Biodiversity conservation and drug discovery: Can they be combined? The Suriname and Madagascar experiences

Abstract

The approach to new drugs through natural products has proved to be the single most successful strategy for the discovery of new drugs, but in recent years its use has been deemphasized by many pharmaceutical companies in favor of approaches based on combinatorial chemistry and genomics, among others. Drug discovery from natural sources requires continued access to plant, marine, and microbial biomass, and so the preservation of tropical rainforests is an important part of our drug discovery program. Sadly, many of the tropical forests of the world are under severe environmental pressure, and deforestation is a serious problem in most tropical countries. One way to combat this loss is to demonstrate their value as potential sources of new pharmaceutical or agrochemical products. As part of an effort to integrate biodiversity conservation and drug discovery with economic development, we initiated an International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) to discover potential pharmaceuticals from the plant biodiversity of Suriname and Madagascar. The Group, established with funding from agencies of the United States government, involved participants from the USA, Suriname, and Madagascar. The basic approach was to search for bioactive plants in the Suriname and Malagasy flora, and to isolate their bioactive constituents by the best available methods, but the work included capacity building as well as research. Progress on this project is reported, drawing on results obtained from the isolation of bioactive natural products from Suriname and Madagascar. The benefits of this general approach to biodiversity and drug discovery are also discussed.

Keywords::

• Suriname
• Madagascar
• biodiversity conservation
• bioactive compounds
• alkaloids
• cardenolides
• terpenoids
• marine metabolites

Acknowledgements

This article was presented at the Symposium: “Plants in the Service of Human Health: Continuing Search for Plant-based Therapies” – Society for Economic Botany 48th Annual Meeting in Chicago at Lake Forest College, June 4, 2007.

Declaration of interest: The work described in this review was carried out under an International Cooperative Biodiversity Group award from the National Institutes of Health, with support from the Fogarty International Center, the National Cancer Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Office of Dietary Supplements, and the Office of the Director of NIH, under Cooperative Agreement U01 TW000313, and this support is gratefully acknowledged. We gratefully acknowledge courtesies extended by the Government of Madagascar (Ministère des Eaux et Forêts). Work in Madagascar was carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the Missouri Botanical Garden, Centre National de Recherches sur l’Environnement, Conservation International, Centre National d’Application des Recherches Pharmaceutiques, and Centre National de Recherches Océanographiques, and with generous financial support of conservation and development by Eisai Research Institute and Dow AgroSciences. Work in Suriname was carried out in collaboration with the Missouri Botanical Garden, Conservation International, and Bedrijf Geneesmiddelen Voorziening Suriname, and with generous financial support of conservation and development by Bristol-Myers Squibb. We are grateful to all these groups for their excellent collaborations, and to the many individual scientists and other colleagues who contributed to the success of this work, and whose names are included in the references cited below.