Discovery and development of marine biomaterials

Functional Marine Biomaterials. http //dx.doLoi l0.101 B978-l-78242-086 6.00001-7 

This chapter reviews the nature, morphology, and extent of this association and use of these structures for bone grafts, drug delivery, and extracts such as proteins for regenerative medicine. The role model for this specific biomimicry is the filtering microskeleton of Foraminifera. New selected strategies based on our and others works for the engineering of new bone based on biomimicry will be also covered. 

Natural historians have compiled a record of structures, processes, and operations from every living organism. The translation of products from nature into technology is fundamental and the most powerful and successful way of resolving technological and scientific problems and conflicts. 

Evolution by natural selection has consistently originated assembly rules and design solutions that have been conserved and reapplied in organisms throughout the gradual ascendency and emergence of new forms of life (Ingber, 1998). 

Nature is a consummate problem solver. We see exquisite, what seem to us as perfect, designs all around us. There are now systematic ways of harnessing these designs for a range of challenges in engineering and in clinical medicine. While nature cannot 

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In healthcare there is a corresponding great divide and per capita investment in countries in the North compared with those in the South is a well-known example. For example, annual per capita expenditures on overall healthcare in the USA was 6,094 in 2007, whereas it is 2,560 in the UK, 1,135 in Korea and 21 in Ethiopia.21 At the same time, very few countries in the South have an industrial infrastructure that can support the discovery and development of medicinal agents—be they synthetic or derived from plant, microbial or marine biomaterials. Consequently, these countries are substantially reliant on imported drugs for primary healthcare—if governments or local residents are able to afford them. 

Marine environment has been receiving growing attention over the last years in which concerns the discovery of new chemical entities or new raw materials for the production of known compounds, in efforts of the so-called marine (or blue) biotechnology. Among those efforts, the development of marine biomaterials is giving the first steps toward a supported and stable role in controlled drug delivery and tissue regeneration. 

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