Great strides have been made during the past decade in understanding the relationship between human health, economic welfare and the environment. Among these advances is the knowledge that improvements in human health may be impeded by the destruction of the natural resources that diversity of biological species provide. For instance, it is estimated that 40-50% of currently used drugs have an origin in natural products. Without most of these drugs many people would have died of disease. However, of the natural resources available on the planet, less than 1% of the world’s taxa have been scientifically investigated for their potential pharmaceutical utility. Thus, it is possible that cures for currently incurable diseases may still be discovered from natural products. Therefore, efforts to examine the medicinal potential of the earth’s plants, animals and microorganisms are urgently needed, since enduring habitat destruction and the resulting decrease of biodiversity will make it increasingly difficult to do so in the future.
To address the interdependent issues of drug discovery, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable economic growth, the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program was created. The conceptual basis for the program was developed during a conference in March of 1991 sponsored by the NIH, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The conference focused on the potential relationships between drug development, biological diversity and economic growth. The first funding competition was initiated in 1992 in a collaborative effort of NIH, NSF and USAID to advance their three interrelated goals. The cooperating NIH components were the Fogarty International Center (FIC), National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Office of Dietary Supplements, and National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The first IBCG program started operation in 1993.
Each individual project is undertaken in such a way that local communities and other source country organizations can derive direct benefits from the effort and, ultimately, from their diverse biological resources, so that benefit-sharing may provide clear incentives for preservation and sustainable use of the biodiversity. Broad public attention to the program and its timing relative to international developments associated with the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity have allowed the ICBG program to offer useful working models for national and international policy discussions related to biodiversity conservation incentive measures, technology transfer, intellectual property and benefit-sharing.
By 2007, there had been three competition cycles and there were seven ICBGs (http://www.fic.nih.gov/programs/research_grants/icbg/awards.htm). These ICBGs operated in nine countries in Latin America, Africa, Southeast and Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands, building research capacity in more than 20 different institutions and training hundreds of individuals. Project’s goals included acquisition and analysis of natural products derived from biological diversity as potential therapeutic agents for diseases of concern to both developed and developing countries. The diseases of concern included AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, cancers, heart disease, drug addiction and central nervous system disorders. These projects also included efforts to carry out biodiversity inventories and surveys, examine and preserve traditional medicine practices, to develop long-term strategies to ensure sustainable harvesting, to promote training and infrastructure support for host-country institutions and long-term funding for biodiversity conservation in the host countries. Four of the seven ICBGs relevant to plant-based research toward human health were invited to make presentations in the symposium: The Papua New Guinea ICBG (Louis Barrows); The Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan ICBG (Ilya Raskin); The Madagascar ICBG (Shugeng Cao); The Panama ICBG (Todd Capson).
The Editors