天然药物化学史话:来自海洋的药物

Historical story on natural medicinal chemistry: Drugs from ocean

海洋独特的环境造就了海洋生物的多样性和海洋生物次生代谢产物的多样性,海洋天然产物新颖的化学结构和独特的生物活性成为新药研发先导化合物的宝库。主要针对近年来已经上市或者具有良好开发前景的海洋药物的发现过程及化学结构进行简要介绍,以期能引起更多专业工作者的兴趣,并借此激励有志于科学研究的年轻工作者。

Unlike terrestrial organisms, marine organisms have to adapt to extreme marine environmental conditions, and to acclimatize to these conditions, marine organisms possess unique characteristics that differentiate from terrestrial organisms in many aspects, such as metabolism. And this led to marine organisms often produce unique secondary metabolites that have not been observed in terrestrial organisms. Diversity of marine natural products has played a fundamental role in biomedical research and drug development during the last decades, either directly as drugs or as leading compounds that were further optimized by medicinal chemists. From these efforts, 10 approved drugs and dozen current clinical trial agents have been discovered, either as natural products or molecules inspired from the natural product structure. This paper summarized the new drugs developed from marine organisms. This is one of the series papers about ＂historical story on natural medicinal chemistry＂.