Marine soft corals as source of lead compounds for anti-inflammatories

Marine soft corals are known to produce a wide array of secondary metabolites, particularly diterpenoids and steroids, and often characterized by uncommon structural features and potent bioactivities. The remarkable abundance and diversity of bioactive small molecule which have been isolated from soft corals have made these organisms an important source of new drug candidates for human diseases, particularly for their anti-inflammatory activity. In this paper, the authors reported anti-inflammatory marine natural products isolated from diverse species of soft corals determined in vitro by their inhibition of lipopolysaccharide-induced expression of inducible NO synthase and cyclooxygenase-2 in murine macrophage cells (RAW 264.7).