Living organisms are a rich source of natural products that can benefit humans. Pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and skin care products are among the many commodities with increasingly natural and enhanced functionality thanks to biomolecules. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme and high-tech genomics approaches, the COSMos project has provided an unprecedented data set pointing to the natural product potential of rarely studied mesophotic sponges and the microbes living in them.