A Mini-Review on Marine Bioactive Compounds as a Source of Antiviral Drug Lead

Currently, pathogens or some microorganisms that are dangerous to human society cause plenty of diseases. All these diseases are spreading because of the limited available treatment options. Some pathogens species are very dangerous to humankind, particularly viral pathogens. These viral pathogens (viruses) have become resistant and immune to many of the medications, thus requiring more and more drug molecules or treatments to be discovered. Many new drugs or treatments are discovered and under clinical trials, and many are being tested. Presently, researchers are in continuous search of newer drugs or molecules using synthetic chemistry or exploring natural resources. However, synthesizing a drug molecule is time-consuming and requires more workforce and much more costly equipment. To tackle this challenge, the use of computational approaches provided complementary information that may also help in the discovery of new molecules. Recently, the fragment molecular orbit based density-functional tight-binding method (DFTB) of drug discovery of drug-like lead is rapid and accurate as compared to conventional computational approaches. Natural resources from land and water can become a choice as an alternative option to discover new entities. The marine environment provides us with a broad spectrum of chemically diverse antiviral compounds isolated from many marine organisms such as bacteria, fungi, sponges, algae, etc. Now, the natural marine molecule as an antiviral agent harrows a new way to modern medicine.