A primary mission for the Center for Marine Biomedical and Biotechnology Research is to discover marine natural products with utility as medicines or as tools to allow us to better understand the molecular basis of disease. Natural products, or secondary metabolites, are small organic molecules produced by organisms. These metabolites are not essential to sustain life (unlike sugars, fats, or proteins), but are thought to confer an evolutionary advantage because energy is required for the organisms to produce natural products. For example, if a sponge makes a compound that is toxic to predators, or tastes bad, that sponge may be protected from being eaten, and has an advantage over one that does not produce the compounds. Because there are similarities between proteins found in humans and those found in sponges, soft corals and other organisms with which we work, we can take advantage of these compounds to use as medicines for diseases affecting those proteins. To this end, our program collects unusual marine organisms — many of them from deep-water habitats — that are the source of novel natural products for our program. We focus on marine plants, invertebrates and the micro-organisms that live in association with them. Harbor Branch's discovery program primarily looks for treatments for cancer and infectious disease, but we also have collaborations with scientists working on malaria, Alzheimer's disease, inflammation, metabolic and ocular diseases. Harbor Branch Marine Biomedical and Biotechnology researchers are members of the State of Florida Center of Excellence in Biomedical and Marine Biotechnology (CEBMB), which is located at HBOI. The CEBMB brings together groups with established expertise in marine biotechnology, functional genomics and bioinformatics in synergistic fashion with the overall goal of discovering and developing new medicines and transferring new technology related to marine drug discovery to the industrial sector. Click here for more information on the CEBMB. |
