Developments of Cyanobacteria for Nano-Marine Drugs: Relevance of Nanoformulations in Cancer Therapies

Abstract

Current trends in the application of nanomaterials are emerging in the nano-biotechnological sector for development of medicines. Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) are photosynthetic prokaryotes that have applications to human health and numerous biological activities as dietary supplements. Cyanobacteria produce biologically active and chemically diverse compounds such as cyclic peptides, lipopeptides, fatty acid amides, alkaloids, and saccharides. More than 50% of marine cyanobacteria are potentially exploitable for the extraction of bioactive substances, which are effective in killing cancer cells by inducing apoptotic death. The current review emphasizes that not even 10% of microalgal bioactive components have reached commercialized platforms due to difficulties related to solubility. Considering these factors, they should be considered as a potential source of natural products for drug discovery and drug delivery approaches. Nanoformulations employing a wide variety of nanoparticles and their polymerized forms could be an emerging approach to the development of new cancer drugs. This review highlights recent research on microalgae-based medicines or compounds as well as their biomedical applications. This review further discusses the facts, limitations, and commercial market trends related to the use of microalgae for industrial and medicinal purposes.

From Marine Origin to Therapeutics: The Antitumor Potential of Marine Algae-Derived Compounds

“…To overcome these drawbacks several approaches have been assessed such as the inclusion of fucoxanthin in nano-emulsions (Huang et al, 2017 ), nano-suspensions (Muthuirulappan and Francis, 2013 ) and nano-gels (Ravi and Baskaran, 2015 ). However as described by Bajpai et al ( 2018 ) for the microalgae, the published data on nano-formulations using compounds derived from macroalgae is also scarce suggesting a new area to be explored that can potentiate the capacity of these compounds in cancer therapeutics.…”

Biological activity of methanol extract from Nostoc sp. N42 and Fischerella sp. S29 isolated from aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems

“…действием. Скрининг цианобактерий на наличие антибиотиков открыл новые возможности в поиске новых лекарственных препаратов (Ahmed et al, 2018;Bajpai et al, 2018). Известно, что различные штаммы цианобактерий продуцируют внутриклеточные и внеклеточные метаболиты с анти-бактериальной активностью (Cragg, Newman, 2013).…”

Cyanobacteria as Natural Therapeutics and Pharmaceutical Potential: Role in Antitumor Activity and as Nanovectors

“…However, more focused research utilizing modern technologies was started in this field in the 1990s. Several cyanobacteria species are cultivated in commercial platforms to extract bioactive compounds, which have been shown to possess anticancer activity and potentially kill a variety of cancer cells via the induction of apoptosis or altering the activation of cell signaling [ 4 , 6 ] ( Figure 1 ).…”