Medical & Nutritional Use of Microfiltered Seawater
Guillermo Gosálbez
After I obtained my Psychology Degree in the University of Miguel Hernández, I studied Biology in the University of Alicante. In parallel to this I started working in the Biomedical Research Department at a French pharmaceutical laboratory called Laboratoires Quinton. My job has been to manage the research carried out by the laboratory in public and private universities and private research centers. During these years, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. José Miguel Sempere Ortels, Professor of Immunology at the University of Alicante, the team of Dr. Antonio Canals, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Alicante and the team led by Dr. Manuel Díaz Llopis, Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Valencia, among other research groups. In addition, I have participated as a speaker in several medical conferences in Spain, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries.
Since the middle of the last century, marine ecosystems have become the new source of medical compounds. However, some decades before, in 1897, the french physiologist René Quinton proposed to use seawater as an own pharmaceutical product. Since then, several research has been done in different medical specialties as digestive medicine, immunology, ophthalmology, dermatology, sports medicine or nutrition, and more than 120 years of clinical practice has permitted us to develop a method to approach different health conditions.
Seawater is one of the most rich and complex substances we know. There is an identity between our internal fluids and seawater; our cells exist in an internal sea that resembles the primordial oceans in which all life originated.
Summary
- Seawater is a complex substance containing major elements, essential trace minerals, and organic nutrients like vitamins and proteins, making it far more than just a mixture of salt and water. - Human extracellular fluid and blood plasma are chemically similar to primordial seawater, supporting the use of microfiltered seawater to maintain the body's internal environment. - Marine therapy has a long history of managing infectious and digestive diseases by effectively replacing electrolytes and fluids lost through symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting. - To preserve nutritional properties, seawater must be harvested from specific plankton blooms and purified using double cold microfiltration rather than heat sterilization. - Modern applications include enhancing athletic performance by reducing lactate levels and treating ophthalmic conditions like dry eye syndrome more effectively than artificial tears.
Article
Medical And Nutritional Use Of Microfiltered Seawater
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Guillermo Gosálbez Made The Case That The Sea Was Not Merely Salt And Water, But A Dense Biological Archive With Medical Promise
In a presentation at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, held in **Helsinki, Finland**, on **1 November 2019**, speaker **Guillermo Gosálbez** invited the audience to reconsider one of the planet’s oldest substances. The sea, he argued, had too often been reduced to a cliché of sodium chloride and blue expanse. In reality, microfiltered seawater represented, in his telling, a complex nutritional matrix rich in trace minerals, vitamins, lipids, proteins and other organic compounds, with emerging uses in rehydration, sports medicine, immunology and ophthalmology.
Gosálbez, whose academic path crossed psychology and biology before leading biomedical research collaborations at **Laboratoires Quinton**, spoke not as a mystic of marine wellness but as a researcher steeped in the language of physiology, analytical chemistry and clinical application. His presentation, titled **“Medical & Nutritional Use Of Microfiltered Seawater,”** drew together historical medical practice and more recent laboratory findings to argue that the ocean, carefully harvested and rigorously purified, could serve as a therapeutic tool.
More Than A Simple Mixture
The central claim of the talk was deceptively simple. Seawater, Gosálbez said, was not just water and salt.
“**Seawater contains essential trace minerals, vitamins, lipids, and proteins, making it a multifaceted substance that goes far beyond a simple mixture of water and salt,**” he said.
This distinction mattered because it repositioned seawater from a crude natural substance to a biologically layered medium. Alongside sodium and chloride, Gosálbez described significant levels of magnesium, calcium and potassium, as well as trace elements such as copper, manganese, cobalt, zinc and molybdenum. He also pointed to the presence of measurable organic nutrients, including vitamins, peptides, carbohydrates and proteins.
In that framing, seawater became less a culinary warning and more a chemical ecosystem.
The Idea Of An Internal Sea
From there, Gosálbez moved to the argument that has long underpinned marine therapy: the resemblance between seawater and the body’s own extracellular fluids.
He cited the work of the French physiologist **René Quinton**, who proposed that blood plasma and other extracellular fluids bear a close chemical relationship to primordial seawater. Gosálbez connected that idea to modern medical teaching, where extracellular fluid is often described as the “internal sea” in which cells live.
The implication was not merely poetic. If the body loses fluid and electrolytes through illness, then replenishing it with a carefully prepared marine solution begins to look, in this view, less exotic than intuitively logical.
“**The perfect way to recover from the loss of electrolytes is microfiltered seawater, because what we lose is an internal liquid very close to the sea’s composition,**” Gosálbez said.
Marine Therapy And The Logic Of Rehydration
Historically, he noted, doctors in France established marine dispensaries in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where microfiltered seawater was used in the treatment of infectious and digestive diseases. The common denominator in many such conditions was severe loss of fluids and minerals through diarrhea and vomiting.
In that sense, the presentation positioned isotonic microfiltered seawater as a form of oral rehydration therapy with a deep historical lineage. Gosálbez described **Quinton Isotonic**, a formulation in which harvested seawater is blended with natural spring water to reduce salinity, as particularly suited to digestive disorders and electrolyte replacement.
The appeal of the solution lay in its completeness. Rather than isolating a few electrolytes, it purported to offer a wider mineral spectrum in proportions closer to biological need.
Why The Source And Process Matter
The romance of natural medicine often stumbles on the reality of contamination, and Gosálbez addressed that tension directly. One could not simply scoop seawater from a shoreline and drink it, he said. Therapeutic seawater had to be collected from specific marine zones and processed with care.
“**Harvesting seawater in plankton blooms ensures that we capture all the nutritional compounds of the sea, as these organisms proliferate in the richest areas of the ocean,**” he said.
According to Gosálbez, the seawater used by his laboratory in Alicante was gathered not from the local Mediterranean coast but from nutrient-rich plankton bloom zones farther north. These blooms functioned as biological signals of marine abundance, indicating areas where the water held a higher concentration of nutritional compounds.
Purification, he said, was equally critical. The seawater underwent **double cold microfiltration**, a method intended to remove pathogens and particulate matter without using heat, which could alter or degrade delicate biological components. He also described extensive laboratory testing for **heavy metals, endotoxins, radioactivity and microplastics**, underscoring an attempt to reconcile natural sourcing with modern safety demands.
A Claim For Immunomodulation
Among the more striking parts of the talk was Gosálbez’s description of research conducted at the **University of Alicante**, where isotonic seawater was studied for its effect on immune cells.
“**We are speaking about the modulation of the immune system; we have discovered through research that we are able to modulate immune cells with isotonic seawater,**” he said.
He presented this as evidence that microfiltered seawater might do more than replace minerals. It might also interact with the immune system in ways worth exploring further. The wording remained careful, rooted in research language rather than sweeping cure-all rhetoric, but the suggestion was significant: seawater as an active biological agent, not merely a passive fluid.
From Elite Sport To Dry Eye Treatment
Gosálbez also highlighted applications in **sports medicine**, where sterilized seawater has been used by elite athletes to maintain electrolyte balance, prevent cramps and reduce the risk of hyponatremia.
“**In sports medicine, we can delay the appearance of fatigue and prevent cramps by using sterilized seawater to reduce lactate levels in the blood and avoid electrolytic imbalances,**” he said.
The reduction of blood lactate, he suggested, could delay fatigue and improve performance under physical stress. For a summit audience attuned to optimisation, the message landed at the intersection of biology and performance culture.
Another domain was **ophthalmology**. Gosálbez described comparative work in which an isotonic Quinton seawater spray reportedly outperformed conventional artificial tears in the treatment of **dry eye syndrome**, owing to its closer resemblance to natural tears. He added that similar benefits had been observed in allergic conjunctivitis.
If true, the finding suggested a curious inversion of modern medicine’s usual direction: not an increasingly synthetic replacement, but a return to a naturally derived medium whose usefulness lay precisely in its biological familiarity.
Two Formulations, One Marine Philosophy
The presentation concluded with the introduction of two products. **Quinton Isotonic** was presented as a lower-salinity preparation intended primarily for digestive conditions and oral rehydration. **Quinton Hypertonic**, by contrast, was described as a more concentrated seawater formulation for broad mineral supplementation in medical and health contexts where replenishment was needed.
Taken together, they reflected the broader philosophy of the talk: that the sea, when harvested from the right place and purified by the right method, could be translated into a practical therapeutic resource.
A Natural Substance Recast As Clinical Material
What made Gosálbez’s presentation notable at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** was not simply its enthusiasm for seawater, but its insistence on recasting a familiar natural element as something clinically structured and scientifically legible. The ocean appeared here not as metaphor, but as matrix. Not as folklore, but as formulation.
Whether all the claims surrounding microfiltered seawater will withstand broader clinical scrutiny remains a question for future research. Yet the presentation made one thing unmistakably clear: in Gosálbez’s view, the therapeutic future of seawater depended not on nostalgia for nature, but on precision. Source mattered. Filtration mattered. Composition mattered. And in that measured attention to what the sea contains, an ancient substance was presented as newly relevant.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki