Chicago Tribune (CT) - TUESDAY, September 12, 1995 Edition: NORTH SPORTS FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 1 Word Count: 1,475
Laurie Goering, Tribune Staff Writer

A spiny solanacea plant, with its huge purple-veined leaves, is used to make a cooling bath used to treat fever. A smaller piparacare is good for stomachache, villagers say. And the tiny, delicate leaves of a local bignoniaceae provide relief from leishmaniasis, an Amazon parasite that produces skin lesions.

"You cook it for a long time until it's like a jam, then put it on the wounds," explains Frits Van Troon, a local naturalist, slashing off one of the plant's delicate fronds with his machete. Could one of these plants be the source of the world's next miracle drug?

Forty years after the invention of synthetic drugs, pharmaceutical companies are returning to the woods in their search for more effective cures for human ailments.

During the past year, workers in Suriname have collected hundreds of samples of such plants and shipped them for screening to the Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Lawrenceville, N.J.

The lab already has recorded several "active hits," or plants worthy of additional testing, according to staffers at Washington-based Conservation International, which is documenting medicinal plant folklore in this tiny former Dutch colony.

Similar discoveries also are being made in Indonesia, where tree extracts are showing promise in fighting HIV infection; in Brazil, where diabetes is being treated with a rain forest shrub; and in the Philippines, where newly discovered fungi and bacteria show promise in treating a variety of ailments.

"The number (of these treatments) that will actually get to market is small, maybe one in 10,000," said Gordon Cragg, chief of the National Cancer Institute's natural products branch. "But there's still a wealth of material out there. There's no doubt that nature is a wonderful source of potential new drugs."

The process of searching for new natural medicines is called bioprospecting. It is largely the result of technological advances that have made it faster and cheaper to screen samples of plants, animals and other natural substances for curative ingredients.

Researchers also are returning to nature, they say, because synthetic drugs haven't always provided the best answer. Strains of malaria, for instance, now resist lab-made preventive drugs in wide use since the 1950s, and new natural treatments are being sought to complement the standby, quinine.

"Bioprospecting was the primary way all drugs were discovered until the '50s or early '60s," said Walt Reid, a bioprospecting specialist and vice president of the World Resources Institute in Washington. "Then synthetic chemistry came along and we moved away from natural resources. Now we're coming back."

The search for natural cures accounts for only about 10 percent of the research budget at most large U.S. pharmaceutical firms, Reid said. But some of those budgets top $1 billion a year at companies such as Merck & Co. Inc., and "that's still a lot of money," he said.

Government agencies also have joined the hunt. This year the National Institutes for Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development will spend $2.3 million to support bioprospecting ventures in the rain forests of Costa Rica, Peru, Suriname and Cameroon, and in the deserts of Mexico, Chile and Argentina.

"It's too early to say whether or not there will be any payoff," said Joshua Rosenthal, coordinator of the interagency project. "But there are a lot of interesting leads."

They include plants like ancistrocladus, a woody vine from Cameroon that is the source of a powerful anti-HIV drug called Michellamine B. Similar potential weapons against AIDS have been found in an Indonesian tree and a shrub in Australia.

None has yet proved as great a success as taxol, which was approved in 1992 for use on advanced ovarian cancer. That landmark natural drug, derived from the bark and needles of the Pacific yew tree, was discovered by the National Cancer Institute, which has been bioprospecting since 1960, well before most pharmaceutical companies.

But thousands of reputed cures potentially as valuable as taxol remain to be investigated.

Along the Maroni River on the French Guinea border, traditional Wayana people capture soldier ants and eat their heads, risking painful stings to get at a chemical they believe wards off malaria.

In Brazil, Maria Elisabeth Van Den Berg, a medicinal plant researcher at the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belem, tells the story of a woman with advanced ovarian cancer who apparently was cured by drinking a mix of sucuuba sap and drops of oil from copaiba, a common Brazilian healing plant.

On Van Den Berg's desk sits an old plastic Coca-Cola bottle jammed with leaves preserved in alcohol. That potion, which she is testing, reputedly has anti-viral properties that one day may become a treatment for oral herpes.

And down at Belem's seething Ver-O-Peso dockside market, vendors, packed inside stalls hung with sloth skins, caiman skulls and bundles of dried roots and leaves, offer treatments for everything from diabetes to diarrhea.

Van Den Berg prowls the stalls, seeking to record folk cures that might be the clue to the next wonder drug-or those that might be lost to the passing of generations.

"Have we forgotten more than we know?" she asks. "I'm sad so many good natural things have been lost."

Just as important as preserving traditional knowledge of medicines, researchers say, is revamping the thinking of what constitutes a cure.

Traditionally, they say, bioprospectors have set out to find a key active ingredient in a key plant that could become the world's next miracle drug.

In reality, traditional cures using plants and animals often are more complex. Sometimes several herbs are taken together to produce the required effect, or a plant that negates hazardous side effects is added to a curative plant to make the treatment effective.

A patient's emotions, including belief in the effectiveness of a cure, also may play a part in making it work, researchers say. And, of course, the definition of what constitutes a disease-or an effective treatment-varies from country to country.

Alcoholism, for instance, was considered a sickness in Brazil long before it was termed one in the U.S. And in the Brazilian Amazon, financial sickness has its own traditional folk remedies.

In many cultures, scents, as well as pills and injections, are considered curative. "Think of Vicks Vaporub," notes William Leslie Overal, a Northwestern University graduate who now works as an animal cure researcher in Belem.

"There are still miracle drugs to be found, obviously," he adds, "but we have to put all this together to find them."

The new international bioprospecting movement faces other challenges as well.

First, in many areas of the world, both medicinal plants and the folklore surrounding them are rapidly being eliminated. At least 90 percent of the plants in the vanishing Brazilian Amazon never have been chemically analyzed, researchers say.

Getting a discovered drug to market also takes at least 10 to 15 years. And lab-developed drugs often are cheaper to develop than those that require sampling trips to remote parts of the world.

Finally, researchers are running up against a moral and logistical problem: How to return part of the profits to the people and countries who provided the cure, or how to justify not doing so.

In Suriname, bioprospectors have set up a Forest People's Fund, which received an initial $50,000 royalty payment from Bristol-Myers Squibb and will get between 1 and 5 percent of royalties from any drugs eventually brought to market.

Traditional healers also may be eligible to share in patents on drugs brought to market.

Such direct payments for plants and knowledge, which remain relatively rare in the bioprospecting world, are intended to encourage local conservation of threatened rain forests and other ecosystems by providing financial incentives.

But bioprospecting is considered unlikely to produce quick returns to forest dwellers, so it may be overrated as a way to preserve vanishing ecosystems.

"Some people have exaggerated the idea of there being gold in the forest," said Reid of the World Resources Institute. "It might be there, but it could be 15 years before it comes out. And that could be damaging to conservation interests."

CAPTION: PHOTO: A glaucoma patient in a central Suriname village is treated with the liquid from a vine. Generations of South Americans have used plants found in the rain forest as their pharmacy. Photo by R.A. Mittermeier/Conservation International. PHOTO (color): Wayana Indians on the Suriname-French Guiana border believe that if they trap soldier ants and eat the heads of the bugs, a chemical found in the insects will act as a malaria preventative. Tribune photo by Laurie Goering. GRAPHIC: Bioprospecting: The search for natural cures. Goals of bioprospecting, promising leads, plants of intererst. Sources: News reports. Chicago Tribune. See microfilm for complete graphic.

Copyright 1995/The Chicago Tribune. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Chicago Tribune, 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611.

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