Bioassay Platforms for the Disclosure of the Pharmaceutical Potential of Marine Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

Marine organisms have proven to be a rich source of diverse natural products with distinctive antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, antiparasitic, antitumor, antiinflammatory, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory activities. Various marine metabolites have shown drug-like physicochemical properties through specific mechanisms of action. A bioassay-guided fractionation is usually conducted for the identified of the pharmaceutical potential of marine natural products, but other strategies can be applied. To purify novel secondary metabolites, it is crucial to develop efficient screening platforms to recognize the samples with the most promise early in the workflow so that resources can be efficiently and cost-effectively used. To avoid the isolation of known molecules, dereplication analysis can now be used to identify candidate bioactive molecules early in the purification step to rationalize the isolation scheme.

A screening platform of bioactive compounds may involve a huge number of analysis assays for assessing the potential of biological extracts or molecules from marine organisms. The assays can be performed at the whole animal, cell, or molecular levels by two different complementary approaches: classical pharmacology, also known as phenotypic drug discovery, which is the historical basis of drug discovery, and reverse pharmacology or target-based drug discovery. The improvement of the whole procedure needs innovative assay platforms that can be used to help to automate testing processes with greater throughput, speed, reliability, and reproducibility.

Dr. Nuzzo Genoveffa
Dr. Carmela Gallo
Guest Editors

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