Selección de microorganismos bacterianos productores de metabolitos con actividad antitumoral

This final degree Project has been carried out at the biopharmaceutical company PharmaMar S.A., leader in the discovery of marine-derived antitumor drugs. Cancer is a major public health problem and one of the leading causes of death in the population, making the research and development of new treatments necessary to reduce the morbidity and mortality of this disease. The oceans cover a large part of the Earth’s surface and present a wide biodiversity that can serve as an unexplored and unlimited resource of bioactive compounds, especially antitumour drugs. Microorganisms associated with any type of marine samples (invertebrates, sediments, etc.) produce a wide range of metabolites associated with survival in extreme habitats (temperature, salinity, pressure, etc.) that may present an interesting cytotoxic activity profile. At the Microbiology Department (I+D) of PharmaMar, a large number of marine samples are processed annually with the aim of finding compounds with antitumor activity produced by marine bacteria present on those samples. For that aim, a bacteria strain of interest capable of producing some type of antitumor compound was selected to evaluate the optimal media and times of production during the fermentation process at both small (mL) and large scales (L) by testing the extracts generated by the strain against four tumour cell lines. With the results obtained, the most favourable media and production times of cytotoxic compounds from the strain were determined, which were subsequently used for the fermentation of the strain on a larger scale to obtain a greater amount of extract in order to elucidate the chemical structure of the compound responsible for the activity.