Marine fungi: An untapped bioresource for future cosmeceuticals

Highlights

• The marine environment offers a large and relatively undiscovered biological and chemical diversity.

• Marine fungi remain under explored in the discovery of bioactive compounds for cosmeceutical applications.

• Cosmeceutical products for skin disorders are a multi-billion dollar category ripe for opportunities.

• Marine fungi have been sources of useful secondary metabolites for the prevention of skin ageing, skin whitening, and the prevention of acne vulgaris.

• New technologies for marine fungi discovery, cultivation and metabolic engineering, together with new bioassay development, provide new opportunities in this area.

Abstract

A number of useful metabolites with cosmeceutical potential have been reported from marine sources over the last several years. Marine life, particularly sponge, algae, tunicates, bacteria and fungi, produces a wide variety of bioactive metabolites whose diversity is enhanced by the varied environmental conditions present in the oceans. The marine environment has a large biological and chemical diversity and serves as a source of novel chemical entities with potential industrial application, including pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, and agrochemicals. Marine fungi represent a relatively untapped bioresource for novel natural product discovery, although over the past decade marine fungi have providing a number of new secondary metabolites. These secondary metabolites isolated from marine fungi have been used in a range of applications, including cosmeceutical application such as anti-ageing, skin-whitening and anti-acne. In addition, a number of lead compounds have been identified from marine fungi for further development as cosmeceuticals. This review article aims to summarize studies on marine fungal secondary metabolites for application in skin health and cosmeceuticals.

Introduction

Nature provides a high diversity of pharmacologically active biomolecules. These natural products are important as leads for the development of novel pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals. The marine ecosystem covers about 70% of the earth's surface and is extraordinarily rich in biological diversity, particularly in tropical environments. According to the Global Biodiversity Assessment by the United Nations Environment Program, the oceans consist of 178,000 marine species across 34 phyla (Mitra and Zaman, 2016). Marine organisms comprise approximately half of the total biodiversity on earth and produce a wide range of novel biomolecules (Jimeno et al., 2004, Vignesh et al., 2011). Between 1989–2002 around 60% of FDA approved drugs and pre-NDA (New Drug Application) candidates were obtained from the natural environment (Chin et al., 2006, Grabley and Thiericke, 1998). In the past 50 years, exploration of marine bioresources for their unique natural products has been an important area of research. Of the estimated 270,000 known natural products, 30,000 compounds have been obtained from marine organisms (Blunt et al., 2015). Out of these, 9 are approved as medical drugs and 13 are undergoing clinical trials (Gerwick and Moore, 2012, Rangel and Falkenberg, 2015). As examples from fungi, the diketopiperazine halimide (or phenylahistin) obtained from the marine fungi Aspergillus ustus, and its synthetic analog Plinabulin (NPI 2358), are in Phase 3 clinical trial for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (Raphael et al., 2017) and Phase 2 clinical trial for Neutropenia prevention (Nalley, 2017).