While at the National Cancer Institute, she managed a program to develop new drugs from marine organisms.
Natural products can lead to new drugs or treatments for disease.
The importance of natural products for drug discovery cannot be overestimated, because we do not have the scientific capability to design drugs from scratch. Unfortunately, we cannot a priori identify those species or populations that contain pharmaceutically valuable chemicals. Indeed, leads for new drugs often come from the most seemingly insignificant organisms. Drug leads are also often restricted to distinct populations. For example, bryostatin 1 is only present in a few southern California populations of Bugula neritina , although all populations contain related metabolites.