Professor Marcel Jaspars, from the Marine Biodiscovery Centre, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, will present the Royal Society of Chemistry lecture with a talk entitled, "Extreme Drug Discovery:  Discovering Medicines from Extreme Environments". 

Almost three-fifths of our medicines have their origin in Nature. Many of these come from plants, but in the 20th Century microorganisms became the main source of new antibiotics and anticancer agents. In the last fifty years, scientists have started to study the unique microorganisms that survive in extreme environments for their ability to provide new pharmaceuticals. This presentation will cover three different types of extreme environment: cold oceans; deep seas and hyper arid deserts. The processes involved from collection through microbial isolation to biological testing against disease states and the discovery of the compounds will be discussed. Some examples of exciting projects that are progressing to the pipeline will also be presented.