The marine environment harbors a number of macro and micro organisms that have developed unique metabolic abilities to ensure their survival in diverse and hostile habitats, resulting in the biosynthesis of an array of secondary metabolites with specific activities. Several of these metabolites are high-value commercial products for the pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical industries. The aim of this review is to outline the paths of marine natural products discovery and development, with a special focus on the compounds that successfully reached the market and particularly looking at the approaches tackled by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies that succeeded in marketing those products. The main challenges faced during marine bioactives discovery and development programs were analyzed and grouped in three categories: biodiversity (accessibility to marine resources and efficient screening), supply and technical (sustainable production of the bioactives and knowledge of the mechanism of action) and market (processes, costs, partnerships and marketing). Tips to surpass these challenges are given in order to improve the market entry success rates of highly promising marine bioactives in the current pipelines, highlighting what can be learned from the successful and unsuccessful stories that can be applied to novel and/or ongoing marine natural products discovery and development programs.

Interesting biological activities have been found for numerous marine compounds. In fact, screening of phylogenetically diverse marine microorganisms from extreme environments revealed to be a rational approach for the discovery of novel molecules with relevant bioactivities for industries such as pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical. Nevertheless, marine sources deliverables are still far from the expectations and new extreme sources of microbes should be explored. In this work, a marine prokaryotic collection from four Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) deep sea hydrothermal vents near the Azores Islands, Portugal, was created, characterized and tested for its photoprotective capacity. Within 246 isolates, a polyphasic approach, using chemotaxonomic and molecular typing methods, identified 23-related clusters of phenetically similar isolates with high indexes of diversity. Interestingly, 16S rRNA gene sequencing suggested the presence of 43% new prokaryotic species. A sub-set of 139 isolates of the prokaryotic collection was selected for biotechnological exploitation with 484 bacterial extracts prepared in a sustainable upscalling manner. 22% of the extracts showed an industrially relevant photoprotective activity, with two extracts, belonging to new strains of the species Shewanella algae and Vibrio fluvialis, uniquely showing UV-A, UV-B and UV-C protective capacity. This clearly demonstrates the high potential of the bacteria MAR vents collection in natural product synthesis with market applications.