The field of marine natural products research continues to evolve since the first Gordon Research Conference on Marine Natural Products was held in Santa Barbara, California in 1975. Who in 1975 would have envisioned how the revolutions in genomics and spectroscopy would advance our field of research? From providing us with novel therapeutic targets for intervention in disease; to identification of the genes and proteins responsible for production of the structurally exciting and diverse compounds that marine environments are known for; to providing new tools to investigate symbiosis and the ecological roles of natural products - technological advances in genomics coupled to revolutionary new methodologies for studying molecules and their biological responses has kept the field of marine natural products vibrant and exciting. The field of Marine Natural Products remains an area where the discoveries we make working on marine organisms and the natural products they produce, change the basic paradigms under which researchers in multiple disciplines will work in the future.

An underlying theme of the meeting is the use of marine natural products as scaffolds for the development of new therapeutics and biochemical tool molecules. Marine natural products with their diverse structures have always held potential as new therapeutics and lead structures for optimization through medicinal chemistry. The past few years have seen the approval of Ziconitide (Prialt™) for chronic pain; European approval of ecteinascidin 743 (Yondelis™) for treatment of ovarian cancer and soft tissue sarcoma; US approval of eribulin mesylate (Halaven™) for the treatment of recurrent breast cancer; and at least four other marine natural products are demonstrating efficacy in Phase II and Phase III cancer trials. Studies on bryostatin, a potent PKC activator originally studied clinically for its anticancer effects, have now led to the development of analogs that are rapidly moving towards clinical trials to help restore memory and learning in Alzheimer’s patients.

Key areas for discussion at the meeting include: lessons learned from clinical development; library generation for use in high throughput screening; new methods for rapid spectroscopic analysis and identification of natural products; defining the molecular targets of bioactive natural products through chemical biology and pharmacology; targeted discovery of new natural products that capitalizes on novel screening paradigms; selective delivery and release of compounds for therapeutic use; total synthesis and structural optimization through medicinal chemistry; biosynthesis of natural products and use of genomics and proteomics to understand production and distribution of natural products; and the ecological role of natural products in defining marine habitats and their responses to global change.