The oceans continue to provide new opportunities for the discovery of marine-derived medicines. These compounds encompass a wide variety of chemical structures and functionalities. Marine capture fisheries contribute over 50% of total world fish production and more than 70% of this production has been utilized for processing. As a result, every year a considerable amount of products, comprising fins, heads, bones, skin and viscera, are generated in land and usually it is utilized as raw material for fish meal and oil production. In addition, the implementation of the new Common Fisheries Policy will force to land a big amount of biomass nowadays discarded at sea. In this perspective, MARMED project aims the valorization of these underutilized marine resources to obtain compounds (marine origin biopolymers and ceramics) with potential biomedical applications. The primary focus of our effort in this area is to research and develop products and applications to be applied in the biomedical area, with particular emphasis in engineering cells and tissues. IIM-CSIC, as a partner of MARMED, is trying to reach the isolation and purification of biomolecules and biopolymers from different sources with potential biomedical application and sharing them with others MARMED partners to develop naturally inspired materials to be applied in the context of pharmaceutical, medical and nutraceutical areas. This work describes the processes employed by the research group of IIM in obtaining the following products: 1.- Extraction of chitin from discarded crustaceans and squid pen 2.- Production of chitosan from previously extracted chitin 3.- Extraction of collagen from skin of several fish species 4.- Production of collagen hydrolysates using the previously extracted collagen 5.- Extraction of chondroitin sulfate from shark cartilage Analytical characterization was carried out to check the purity and quality of obtained products. In some cases, several bioactivities were tested

Póster.-- 44th WEFTA meeting, 9-11 June 2014, Bilbao (Spain)

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