Cancer is a dreadful human disease, increasing with changing lifestyle, nutrition, and global warming. Its treatments do not have potent medicine as the currently available drugs results in severe side effects. Past activities in this area focused on the natural products derived from medicinal plants. According to the WHO, 80% of the world’s population primarily those from developing countries rely on plant-derived medicines for the health care. Over the past few decades, significant efforts have been made, jointly by pharmaceutical and academic institutions, to isolate and identify new marine-derived natural products. With the advancement of technology and methodology in this area, numerous new compounds have been isolated and several novel anticancer compounds are under clinical investigations. The ocean biomass, covering two-third of the earth, with huge unexplored natural product offers enormous scope and presents an effective alternative in natural product drug discovery. The uniqueness in oceanic mega-diversity is due to spatial as well as temporal competition along with unique habitat with extreme pressure, temperature, and saline conditions. As a result of this, marine organisms have adapted and evolved themselves successfully since centuries in these conditions by producing molecules which are unique in structures, biosynthesis, and function. This “chemical adaptations” is an excellent source of novel chemical entities which is absent in land-based organisms. The past decade has seen more than 10,000 compounds isolated from marine sources which have dramatically increased the number of preclinical anticancers drug under evaluation, and over 300 patents on bioactive natural products from marine sources were granted during this tenure. Efforts, in this direction, became more serious and focused with National Cancer Institute, USA taking a lead role. By collaborative interactions between pharmaceutical companies and research organization, numerous drug-like molecules with several of them having clinical and preclinical potential were discovered. Ecteinascidin-743/ET-743 from Caribbean tunicate and Didemnin and Aplidine from Aplidium albicans are some of the successful examples. Sterols and dietary fibers from seaweeds also hold immense potential. However, investigation of the marine floras chemical entities as drug-like molecule is still in its embryonic stage. The present chapter showcases the past research and reviews the baseline data for promoting further research in this field.
Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy is an analytical technique used for the qualitative and quantitative determination of the elements present in different samples like food, nanomaterials, biomaterials, forensics, and industrial wastes. The main aim of this book is to cover all major topics which are required to equip scholars with the recent advancement in this field. The book is divided into 12 chapters with an emphasis on specific topics. The first two chapters introduce the reader to the subject, it's history, basic principles, instrumentation and sample preparation. Chapter 3 deals with the elemental profiling, functions, biochemistry and potential toxicity of metals, along with comparative techniques. Chapter 4 discusses the importance of sample preparation techniques with the focus on microextraction techniques. Keeping in view the importance of nanomaterials and refractory materials, chapters 5 and 6 highlight the ways to characterize these materials by using AAS. The interference effects between elements are explained in chapter 7. The characterizations of metals in food and biological samples have been given in chapters 8-11. Chapter 12 examines carbon capture and mineral storage with the analysis of metal contents.
Cancer is a dreadful human disease, increasing with changing lifestyle, nutrition, and global warming. Its treatments do not have potent medicine as the currently available drugs results in severe side effects. Past activities in this area focused on the natural products derived from medicinal plants. According to the WHO, 80% of the world’s population primarily those from developing countries rely on plant-derived medicines for the health care. Over the past few decades, significant efforts have been made, jointly by pharmaceutical and academic institutions, to isolate and identify new marine-derived natural products. With the advancement of technology and methodology in this area, numerous new compounds have been isolated and several novel anticancer compounds are under clinical investigations. The ocean biomass, covering two-third of the earth, with huge unexplored natural product offers enormous scope and presents an effective alternative in natural product drug discovery. The uniqueness in oceanic mega-diversity is due to spatial as well as temporal competition along with unique habitat with extreme pressure, temperature, and saline conditions. As a result of this, marine organisms have adapted and evolved themselves successfully since centuries in these conditions by producing molecules which are unique in structures, biosynthesis, and function. This “chemical adaptations” is an excellent source of novel chemical entities which is absent in land-based organisms. The past decade has seen more than 10,000 compounds isolated from marine sources which have dramatically increased the number of preclinical anticancers drug under evaluation, and over 300 patents on bioactive natural products from marine sources were granted during this tenure. Efforts, in this direction, became more serious and focused with National Cancer Institute, USA taking a lead role. By collaborative interactions between pharmaceutical companies and research organization, numerous drug-like molecules with several of them having clinical and preclinical potential were discovered. Ecteinascidin-743/ET-743 from Caribbean tunicate and Didemnin and Aplidine from Aplidium albicans are some of the successful examples. Sterols and dietary fibers from seaweeds also hold immense potential. However, investigation of the marine floras chemical entities as drug-like molecule is still in its embryonic stage. The present chapter showcases the past research and reviews the baseline data for promoting further research in this field.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.