The new prospectors are called bioprospectors, and they are researchers who are looking for the source of the next major drugs to treat cancer, AIDS, and a host of other diseases. Md. And now, researchers who work in a field called ethnobotany are using the knowledge of traditional healers to help lead them to promising medicinal plants, according to an overview of the efforts presented by Cragg and two other researchers Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many of today's most important drugs contain compounds that come from plants, despite the increasingly sophisticated techniques available to chemists, who create thousands of new compounds to test for use as potential drugs, Cragg says. And plants will remain one of the best sources of new compounds. That's because each plant species produces a large variety of original chemical compounds, and only a few of the approximately 250,000 higher-plant species in the world have been investigated.
Nature is the best molecular architect because it has been working for eons.
Bioprospecting efforts, which test substances in marine animals, plants, and very small organisms, are yielding a number of promising compounds, Cragg says. To find them, the researchers use a combination of chemical and drug screening techniques. Among the most promising anticancer compounds is a substance called bryostatin 1, which was found in a marine animal called a bryozoan. Bryostatin-1 appeared safe and effective against one type of cancer in early human trials, Cragg says. Bryostatin is now being tried in larger human experiments to accurately gauge its effectiveness, he says. Bioprospecting efforts have yielded drugs to treat other conditions as well.