Natural Products from the Sea: Ethnopharmacology, Nutrition and Conservation

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Feb, 2001 by Tim Batchelder

Other methods being explored to produce marine drugs and natural products include aquaculture and chemical synthesis (Tsujii et al. 1988). The vast majority of compounds from the sea, however, are not easily synthesized. Many take 100 steps or more, compared to an average of 10 to 15 steps for medicinal compounds. And many of the marine bacteria are not culturable. These realities have marine researchers now looking to biotechnology's symbiosis and gene transfer (transferring genes into easily culturable organisms.) For many marine invertebrates the host itself isn't actually producing these compounds but instead relies on microbes (symbiosis) that can be easily cultured. (Harrigan et al. 1998, Bewley and Faulkner 1998.) Scripps Institute of Oceanography Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/research/cmbb has just licensed a microbial anticancer agent with powerful effects on prostate cancer, as well as very potent anti-inflammatory and antiviral agents for use against herpe s.

In contrast to drug companies, nutritional supplement companies do not face the need to extract active compounds from marine natural products since they generally sell them in their whole state. As a result, few are presently looking into chemical synthesis or biotechnology to increase production, although many are performing biochemical analysis of their products to determine which compounds are bioactive. Currently, a controversial topic in nutritional natural product research is the issue of standardization, the process of ensuring that a product has certain amounts of a marker compound that is active medicinally.

Marine nutritional supplements such as sea vegetables are also sometimes difficult and expensive to harvest in the wild. Yet, since they are harvested in their whole, unrefined state and usually from near-shore environments, the cost of harvesting and producing these products is much less than pharmaceuticals. Ecologically there is much less waste since the entire organism is used, instead of just extracting active compounds as occurs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Nutritional supplements are also increasingly being derived from marine microorganisms. Australian microalgae, presently used throughout Australia in the formulation of crucial live feeds for young aquaculture species such as oysters, prawns and abalone, is now being cultured for nutraceutical production internationally, supplying large markets in Asia and America. Australian manufacturers are currently supplying the nutraceutical market with betacarotene and other compounds such as omega 3 fatty acids derived from microalgae.

Sea Vegetables

Besides drugs, the oceans are potential resources for a wide variety of non-drug nutritional natural products. These products are not regulated as drugs by the FDA but rather as dietary supplements and thus the cost of researching and developing them is much less. In general they are much less toxic than drugs, being consumed largely as they occur in nature rather than in refined or synthesized form. On the other hand they are less potent than drugs and thus are largely designed to promote health rather than for particular medical conditions. The following brief consumer guides to nutritional natural products were derived from www.mothernature.com and written in part by Craig Weatherby, myself and other content staff there.