Marine Anticancer Drugs

Marine derived fungi have shown in recent years to produce a plethora of new bioactive secondary metabolites with biological activities mainly focused in the areas of antibiotic and anticancer properties.There lies immense scope of exploring marine fungus to obtain antitumor leads and drugs. In this study, we have taken seven secondary metabolites obtained from marine derived fungi that are experimentally proven to be cytotoxic against various human/cancer cell lines. But the biological targets and mechanism of action (MOA) of these compounds are not elucidated till date because of various technological and economic hindrances. Using Pharmmapper - a web server for drug target identification, we found the potential antitumor targets of these compounds and determined their cancer relevance later.Further molecular docking studies and binding site predictions were performed to predict the affinity and binding sites of the cytotoxic compounds with their potential targets.This study indicates the importance of cytotoxic secondary metabolites from marine fungi in regards to their use as antitumor agents.