Sponges have huge potential in terms of the development of new drugs. Cytotoxic constituents were found in 10% of the sponges examined. This is a promising statistic when you consider that there are some 15,000 sponge species around the world.
But harvesting sponges from their natural habitat for the large-scale production of bioactive constituents is neither ecologically nor economically viable. Large-scale in-vitro sponge cell cultures under controlled conditions may, however, be a possibility. Up until now, every attempt to develop a method like this has met with failure. In this piece of research, we did manage to introduce a human telomerase transcriptase (hTERT) into sponge cells, which ensured that sponge cells continue to divide.