Bioprospecting

Bioprospecting (also known as biodiversity prospecting) is the exploration of natural sources for small molecules, macromolecules and biochemical and genetic information that could be developed into commercially valuable products for the agricultural, aquaculture, bioremediation, cosmetics, nanotechnology, or pharmaceutical industries. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, almost one third of all small-molecule drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 1981 and 2014 were either natural products or compounds derived from natural products.

Terrestrial plants, fungi and actinobacteria have been the focus of many past bioprospecting programs, but interest is growing in less explored ecosystems (e.g. seas and oceans, caves and polar regions) and organisms (e.g. extremophiles, tropical corals and necrophages) as a means of identifying new molecules with novel biological activities. Species may be randomly screened for bioactivity or rationally selected and screened based on ecological, ethnobiological, ethnomedical, historical or genomic information.

When a region's biological resources or indigenous knowledge are unethically appropriated or commercially exploited without providing fair compensation, this is known as biopiracy. Various international treaties have been negotiated to provide countries legal recourse in the event of biopiracy and to offer commercial actors legal certainty for investment. These include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol. The WIPO is currently negotiating more treaties to bridge gaps in this field.