Reaping New Meds From Old Cures (
Hoodia
Gordonii )
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa --
Samson Mvubu's corner of the bustling Faraday Market is crammed with
bundles of bark, roots, bulbs and animal parts used to treat all
manner of maladies, ranging from madness to coughs and infections.
Mvubu is an "inyanga" -- a
traditional herbalist. He spent years learning to treat illnesses
using plants found in the fields and forests surrounding his
village. Visitors to this market located underneath an urban freeway
come to Mvubu for cures from the countryside. Among them are a small
but growing number of scientists, who show up armed with notebooks
and ask lots of questions.
"The traders here are not happy
about them," he says of the scientists. "They just run away with our
plants under their arm and they don't come back."
Five years ago, few
scientists bothered to visit Mvubu and his fellow healers. Now,
however, it seems the world is waking up to the vast untapped
potential of biological and indigenous resources.
Bioprospecting -- searching nature for
plants and animals with commercially useful properties -- is a
booming field. Traditional healers like Mvubu, who tend to come from
poor, marginalized communities, increasingly are perceived as the
ones who might lead scientists to important discoveries.
"Everyone wants access to
biodiversity," says Dr. Marthinus Horak, manager of bioprospecting
at the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research,
or CSIR,
which is sponsored by the South African government.
Indeed, 50 miles away in
CSIR laboratories,
scientists pore over many of these same substances used by Mvubu and
his colleagues, looking to isolate genes and compounds to form the
basis of new drugs for obesity, HIV/AIDS, cancer, respiratory
ailments and other diseases.
With 24,000 plant species,
the biodiversity of this country is almost unparalleled. And with
almost 300,000 traditional healers nationwide, local knowledge of
plants and their uses is equally abundant. Increasingly,
CSIR
scientists tap into the knowledge of traditional healers, who have
helped to identify hundreds of the plants researchers are studying
now.
However, in South Africa -- where
at least 70 percent of people rely on traditional remedies, and
where newspapers run stories of AIDS patients who swear by "miracle"
herbal concoctions -- no major drug has yet been developed.
Dr. Namrita Lall, a botanist at
the University of Pretoria, is one of many hoping to change that.
Working with a traditional healer, she has found what could be a
promising alternative treatment for tuberculosis. She started with
the premise that healers used certain plants to treat chest
ailments, and wondered if they might be treating cases of TB without
even knowing it. When she approached traditional healers and
explained what she was trying to do, she says, only one man was
willing to help.
"He said I had picked a very
difficult thing," she recalls. "He said he sends his patients to the
doctor with TB."
Nevertheless, Lall bought samples
from the healer's shop and took them back to her laboratory to
study. She tested 20 different plants, exposing their extracts to TB
bacteria. Eventually, one of the compounds was shown to work on
TB-infected mice. Now, she says, the treatment is in the pretrial
stage.
Cont. |
