Nereus: Down to the sea

By Kathryn Calkins

Staff Writer Until recently, the single richest source of drugs was microbes. But as land-based microbial sources began to produce fewer novel compounds, the question was where to go for high diversity and a large number of organisms. Nereus Pharmaceuticals Inc. has turned to the ocean as a source of structural diversity. The compounds it finds differ in structure both from those isolated from land microbes and from ones produced through combinatorial chemistry...