In the sponges? No, more inside!

2003/03/10 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Biologia
• Farmakologia

In search of new drugs for human diseases, pharmaceutical companies have been chasing the inhabitants of the sea for years. Much of the research is done with sponges that produce substances that can be useful against certain diseases. Or at least they believed it. In fact, as has been verified at the meeting of the European Association of Marine Biotechnology, the topics of interest are produced by microorganisms that live in sponges and not by sponges. This announcement, although it seems surprising, has surprised several researchers.

Consequently, instead of growing sponges in the laboratory, more attention has been requested to microorganisms. This is not a bad news, since the extraction and commercialization of minimal quantities of chemicals from the sponges requires the obtaining of thousands of tons of sponges that are not found in the best time. However, it will now be necessary to determine which are the most interesting microorganisms and if they are susceptible to being cultivated in the laboratory, since only 1% of those living with sponges meet this requirement. They have a long way ahead.