Natural products and/or natural product derived compounds continue to play a highly significant role in the drug discovery and development process.The ocean with a myriad of unique microenvironments,many of them unexploited until now,has already provided scaffolds for several important drugs,including AZT.BIOALVO,a Portuguese biotech company,with the collaboration of Portuguese universities,leads the LUSOEXTRACT project,and is creating a library of around 40000 natural products extracts from unique Portuguese ecosystems.