It can be said that nearly 90% of medication available on the market have
their origins from plants. So why have pharmaceutical companies given up the search for new treatments? By Mohammed Nazemi.Historically, large pharmaceutical companies would scour the world looking for plants with active ingredients. This active ingredient is then identified (not a simple process when most samples will have several active ingredients), isolated and extracted.
This extracted ingredient is then scrutinised in every way imaginable, and the reasons for its actions noted. If possible we’d love to bottle it and
sell it but more often than not, this ingredient now becomes a template
for other manmade ingredients with little changes made to its structure.
It’s very much a trial and error technique and for every 250,000 compounds tested only one will make it to clinical trials. And of all the compounds that make it to clinical trials, only 5% make it onto the shelf.
More recently this has all changed.
We find more often than not that nowadays there aren’t as many pharmaceutical companies scouring the globe for new undiscovered medicines. Now we tend to use and improve on existing medications.
Is this a lack of funds or a lack of belief in what nature can offer?
Ethnobotanist James Wong has his own prime time television show, ‘Grow Your own Drugs’, which sees him making traditional medicines from plants.
In this episode we see James use fruit to produce cold and flu remedies, along with other traditional remedies.
For more serious health problems it cannot be claimed that medicinal products, only available with a prescription, can be ignored… Neither is it advisable to experiment with non medicinal remedies if you are pregnant or have underlying health conditions.
However, perhaps ethnobotanists such as James Wong are proving such a success because they illustrate the romance of leading a more rural life, the kind of romantic ideal that used to see pharmaceutical companies scour the globe in hunt of plants to discover new medicines and cures for diseases.
This time has gone. Lets hope the discoveries for cures and treatments of diseases can be transferred to the laboratory instead.
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