Study of cytotoxic compounds derived from natural products

Natural products have been an important treasure house in new drug discovery, especially in anticancer drug development. This project is aimed at discovery of novel cytotoxic compounds that are able to kill cancer cells derived from organisms that have not been explored before. Active compounds will be identified using bioassay-guided fractionation, in which the brine shrimp lethality assay is used as the primary screening approach and mammalian cancer cell line assay as the secondary screening approach. In our primary screening, extracts from two marine sponges, Darwinella mulleri and Dysidea camera showed moderate activity with lethality of 50% and 80%, respectively. Following chromatography isolation, structural elucidation methods will be used to characterize the structures of compounds that responsible for the activity.