By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jul 10 1995 (IPS)

Blood of the Dragon, Smokebush and sundried Endod – these are some of the latest finds from the rainforests, deserts and river valleys – that local people and scientists say could hold the key to medicines for a variety of ills from snail fever to AIDS.

The stakes are high – a recent estimate put the possible profits from these ventures at 147 billion dollars – but the chances of finding them range as high as one in a million and the time to develop the medicines could take as long as 25 years.

The medicine hunters or “bio-prospectors” typically come from universities but the money for their work comes from governments or large pharmaceutical companies.

But environmental activists say that at best the new finds may not really benefit the local people and at worst might even split up communities in the rush to make a profit.

“Sangre de Drago,” which translates loosely as “blood of the dragon” is a burgundy-coloured sap from the bark of the croton tree. Used by the Quichua people of Ecuador to stop bleeding, among other uses, it has attracted the notice of a California company called Shaman Pharmaceuticals which has taken samples of the bark back to test in its laboratories.

Shaman, however, has been shopping around to find the plant elsewhere so that it does not have to depend exclusively on supplies from Ecuador. Recently the company bought thousands of kilogrammes from the Aguaruna and Huambisa people who live on the eastern slopes of the Andes in the Alto Maranon part of the Amazon in Peru.

That is precisely what Eli Lilly did after it discovered the rosy periwinkle in Madagascar could alleviate blood cancer in children – it looked for other sources of the plant. It found the rosy periwinkle in countries from Australia to India and today Madagascar does not get a penny of the estimated 100 million dollars in annual sales.

Shaman Pharmaceuticals promises to act more responsibly to communities and has already contributed to local groups in Ecuador and Peru although the Californian company has yet to market a product.

Smokebush, an Australian plant, is another possible source of new medicines. This plant was collected by U.S. Department of Agriculture collectors in 1980 from the deserts of Western Australia and brought to the laboratories of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) near Washington.

NCI has isolated a drug called conocurvone from the smokebush that stops the replication of the HIV virus in test tubes, on which they have applied for a patent.

Suspicious that they would be excluded from any profits, representatives of the Western Australia Department of Conservation and Land Management, investigated and caught an NCI collector allegedly smuggling Smokebush out of the country in 1992.

“Our practices in the past were different. Today we have an agreement with the Australians and we guarantee that all other local communities we work with will get a share of their profits,” says Gordon Cragg, the chief of the natural products branch of the NCI.

But even agreements that share patent rights typically benefit just a few people in the community. Take Endod – also known as the African soapberry plant – which has been used for centuries in many part of Africa as shampoo and laundry soap as well as to stun fish for cooking.

Biologist Aklilu Lemma noticed that downstream from where women were washing their clothes with the soapberry in his native Ethiopia, dead snails were often found floating in the water. His research showed that sun-dried and crushed soapberries were lethal to all kinds of snails but not to humans or animals.

Lemma was given an honorary doctorate for his work by the University of Toledo in Ohio. The university then applied for a patent on Endod after he showed them that it would kill zebra mussels, a pest that has caused billions of dollars worth of damage to ships and factories in the Great Lakes on the Canadian border.

Effectively this means that any profits from this plant in the United States will go to the university. Some money will also go to Lemma, as a joint patent holder, but the Ethiopian community which first discovered and cultivated the plant will not have any rights to sell it in this country.

“Little credit is given to the wisdom of traditional societies in their ability to select over long periods of time, such natural products for their continued and demonstrably safe use,” says Lemma who has decided to set up a non-profit foundation in Ethiopia with some of his profits.

Scientists often fail to understand the contribution of local people believing that the only “real” contribution to society occurs when medicinal value is established in an “internationally- recognised” laboratory, he adds.

Although the profits from Endod, Sangre de Drago and Smokebush have yet to be realised, there are many precedents to show that the money to be made from medicinal plants could be considerable.

The pharmaceutical companies already derive substantial profits from plants – 1985 sales of plant-based drugs were estimated at some 43 billion dollars in Europe, Japan and North America.

Michael Balick of the New York Botanical Gardens estimates that there are 328 potential drugs in the forests worth 148 billion dollars. Drug companies say they spend an average of 231 million dollars and 12 years to develop each drug.

Experts in the field say that everyone tries to make the most he can. Chris Joyce, author of Earthly Medicines, a new book on bioprospecting, says that Shaman has only turned over a few thousand dollars to local communities so it remains ot be seen how much locals will make when the profits start to come in.

Most observers are waiting to see what happens in the pioneering agreement in this field signed by Merck, a New Jersey company and the government of Costa Rica in 1992.

Merck has given Costa Rica a million dollars upfront and promised them a share in the profits for discoveries made in their country. The agreement runs out in 1996 but any new drug is unlikely to come on to the market until next century.

Jose-Esquinas Alcazar, an expert at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, points out that this does not prevent Merck from refusing to share profits for plants discovered in one country that may be available in other countries such as neighbouring Nicaragua.

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