In accordance with the project's ground rules, a Surinamese company has been equipped and funded to do the initial extractions. Native technicians were trained, and testing began last summer. So far nothing particularly active against cancer has been found, but Kingston is optimistic that useful chemicals will emerge from the rainforest. This will be true even if the original plant is so rare that the drug must be duplicated synthetically in the lab. And a lot more to determine if you have something worth marketing.
Patience is a virtue a chemist learns to develop.
Kingston began doing unsponsored research on the cancer-fighting drug, taxol, back in 1979. Three years passed before he received even modest funding for the project and five more elapsed before he and graduate student Zhiyang Zhao were able to patent their water-soluble derivative of taxol. Taxol comes from a relatively rare Pacific yew, so it had to show some very exciting anticancer activity to be worth looking at. Luckily, it was an allergic reaction to the emulsifying agent, so taxol was still in the running. Kingston's particular contribution to taxol research was to bypass the emulsion by creating a water-soluble taxol derivative.