Marine natural products drug discovery from actinomycetes at fundacion MEDINA

Among microbial environments, marine-derived actinomycetes represent a highly diverse source for finding new NPs that remains still largely underexplored for Human Health Drug Discovery. Fundación MEDINA is devoting strong efforts in evaluating this genuine source for novel leads by collaborating with more than 20 international partners through granted projects, developing a library of NPs extracts and fractions for HTS drug discovery derived from the subset of marine actinomycetes included in our microbial collection of 116.000 strains.

Strategies followed in the generation of this Library of marine NP extracts included: geographical and taxonomic selection of strains, focused fermentation methodologies, and tailored-made semi-automated SPE extraction and fractionation approaches to overcome the special characteristics of marine-like culture media. As a result, MEDINA's Marine Natural Products Program is starting to generate new promising hits with high potential to be developed as Drug candidates. Global screening results, mainly focused on our anti-infective programs will be discussed including preliminary results on the identification of some of the new molecules derived from this Drug Discovery effort.