From cancer treatments to antiviral therapies, some of today’s most powerful medicines trace their origins to an unexpected place: the ocean. But while the sea holds enormous pharmaceutical promise, scientists say the challenge has always been finding sustainable ways to turn rare marine molecules into usable drugs.
That tension is at the heart of a recent review by Zubair Abdulkarim, a microbiologist and assistant professor at MES Ponnani College in Kerala, India, who examined so-called blue pharmaceuticals—drugs derived from marine organisms.
“Approximately 40,000 marine natural products have been isolated to date, with 38 compounds advancing to clinical trials and 13 achieving FDA approval,” Abdulkarim reports. Those approved medicines are already being used to treat a wide range of conditions, including breast cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, viral infections, and chronic pain.
Despite that success, the pipeline from ocean discovery to pharmacy shelf is notoriously slow. According to Abdulkarim, the main bottleneck is not scientific curiosity but simple supply.
“Supply has always been one of the biggest obstacles in marine drugs,” he says. “There are numerous bioactive molecules that are made in such small amounts by nature that extraction in quantities large enough for drug development is neither economically viable nor ecologically sound.”
One striking example is eribulin, a chemotherapy drug inspired by halichondrin B, a compound originally found in the marine sponge Halichondria okadai. The natural source, however, was never practical for large-scale use.
“An average of 1 ton of the marine sponge Halichondria okadai produces just 1 g of halichondrin B,” Abdulkarim writes. “Therefore, it could never be made available for use in clinical trials through natural collection.”
That extreme scarcity triggered what he described as one of the most complex total-synthesis efforts in pharmaceutical history. Scientists eventually created a simplified synthetic analogue of eribulin that retained the cancer-fighting power of the original molecule. Even so, Abdulkarim notes that “time from discovery to FDA approval was nearly four decades, and supply shortages were the predominant limiting factor for many years.”
To avoid repeating that story, researchers are now exploring alternative production strategies. Marine aquaculture—such as farming sponges or corals—has shown promise, but results vary widely depending on species, growth conditions, and cost.
Looking ahead, Abdulkarim points to a more scalable vision: microalgal biorefineries. “Microalgae are photosynthetic microorganisms that can be grown on a large scale and have been demonstrated to produce various bioactive compounds,” he writes.
In a biorefinery model, microalgae could be processed into multiple high-value products, including drugs, nutraceuticals, biofuels, and animal feed. Such systems, Abdulkarim argues, could support a sustainable blue bioeconomy—one that not only delivers lifesaving medicines, but also helps clean the environment in the process.
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