Unlocking nature's healing hands - Natural products hold the key to the world's health
Published:Wednesday | June 4, 2014 | 12:00 AM
Anastasia Cunningham, Health Coordinator
Our forefathers have long touted the miraculous health benefits of natural herbs and spices and their healing properties. Hardly known to frequent a doctor's office, our ancestors mainly relied on Mother Nature as their physician.
Today, more persons are accepting the invaluable benefits of 'old people remedy', recognising that countless plant species hold the key to curing many of the world's diseases, while others have extraordinary health benefits. According to the World Health Organisation, 80 per cent of the world's population engage in natural medicines. In Jamaica, 73 per cent reportedly self-medicate with herbs.
However, researchers have not even begun to scratch the surface in unlocking the many health benefits nature holds. In fact, according to recent data, only 10 per cent of the world's approximate 350,000 plant species have been studied for their phytochemical and pharmacological benefits.
So far, over 120 chemical substances have been derived from plants used as drugs. 75 per cent of those were discovered by examining the use of these plants in traditional medicine, and a large proportion of these have come from tropical forest species.
Jamaica's Natural Products Institute (NPI) is on a quest to unlocking the secrets of the island's numerous indigenous plant species, which, hopefully, will lead to major medical breakthroughs.
Jamaica is in a biological hotspot, with 23 per cent of known plants around the world endemic to the island. Additionally, 348 plant species found in Jamaica are listed as medicinal, 193 of which have been studied at the University of the West Indies (UWI) for the past 50 years for their healing and beneficial health properties. From that research, so far, crude extracts of 80 plants have been found to have some bioactivity: in the form of anti-diabetic, anti-hypertensive, pesticidal, antimicrobial, anti-cancer, among other things.
Located at the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI in St Andrew, for the past 13 years, the NPI has been dedicated to studying Jamaica's natural resources and unearthing the powers they hold.
"Mother Nature holds the key to finding new drugs, compounds and chemicals for a vast array of diseases as well as other uses, and natural-product research is considered the missing link to that healthier world. We, here in Jamaica, are sitting on something that is quite valuable," Dr Rupika Delgoda, executive director of the NPI, told The Gleaner.
Only one of its kind
The only centre of its kind in Jamaica, the NPI was founded in 2001 under Professor Kenneth Hall, who was the then principal. Its purpose was to find a way to harness valuable properties from the country's natural resources, working in conjunction with the chemistry department, which for the past 50 years, has been doing natural product chemistry.
The NPI has been screening local plants, including endemics, marine organisms and microorganisms as extracts and active ingredients. Among other things, its studies focus on products for disease prevention and treatment, including treatment for cancer and diabetes; drug-herb interactions; pesticide resistance by dengue and malaria mosquitoes; and value-added extractions for patents.
The research team has been working on anti-diabetic and anti-hypertensive properties, cancer preventive properties, drug-herb interaction, and effective pesticides.
So far, the NPI has discovered properties for various uses in a number of plants that were never been known before. They now have one full United States patent and two preliminary patent applications in the pipeline. The institution and its research team have also earned a number of publications in international peer-reviewed journals, as well as several awards for their work.
"One of our key areas of research is the safe use of herbs. A wide number of persons use prescription drugs along with herbal products, not recognising the danger of drug-herb interactions. So we need to make people, doctors and the wider medical community aware of the dangers of this interaction," said Delgoda.
Another significant area of research being undertaken is finding a compound that can be used as an additive to make pesticides more effective against mosquitoes.
"Mosquitoes have developed a resistance to pesticides, and so we are now looking at ways of counter balancing that resistance that they are developing. In other words, we can use the same pesticide, but we can make it more effective by finding natural products to do that," she noted.
At the institution's recently launched anti-cancer research lab, several plants are now being investigated for their cancer-prevention and treatment properties.
"Based on what we have discovered so far in our extensive research, I believe that it is worth the effort to explore much further. With research, as with anything else, you never know if you will find anything, it is a risk. But given that we have species here that do not occur anywhere else in the world, it is fully worth us investigating much, much deeper, because if we don't do it, someone else will come and do it and reap the benefits from it," stated Delgoda.
"Even the little that we have investigated so far, we have managed to have two or three patent applications from that, which gives me a lot of hope. And I don't think we have even scratched the surface."
Full potential to come
She added, "I think the full potential has not come out yet. I seriously think that there are things hidden that we have not fully unearth. And I think that the full biological value of them have not come out to the world as yet.
"Look at the periwinkle plant, for example. It was first being tested for its use in diabetes, but ultimately, the drug that came out of it was for cancer, so we have to investigate natural products for a number of usages and not just focus on one thing."
Delgoda concluded, "So let's do the work, let's do the research so that we can know if we have something valuable or not. We want to make the Natural Products Institute the centre of excellence for research."
Ultimately, she said, they are hoping to extend the institution to reap commercial, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals and cosmetic benefits. She said that, already, there were some projects that were ready to be commercialised.
Recently, Health Minister Dr Fenton Ferguson said of the institute, "I have always been of the view that we are an agriculturally rich nation, but we have never lived up to our potential, which includes using this asset effectively to fight diseases. I am excited by the prospects of a laboratory that can detect cancer-fighting and prevention agents within our local natural products."