CHEMISTRY
Joel Miller
Thanh N. Truong
Peter J. Stang
MATHEMATICS
Graeme W. Milton
Jim Carlson
PHYSICS
Charles Jui
Charles Jui
Craig Taylor
Valy Vardeny
Valy Vardeny
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The Medicine People
By Lee Siegel
The Salt Lake Tribune
Utah biologist Phyllis "Lissy" Coley and her husband, Tom Kursar, are so busy trying to save Panama's rain forest they have little time to visit it.
"We hardly get to spend any time in the forest, unfortunately -- perhaps one day every two weeks when we are in Panama," said Coley, a University of Utah
professor.
"It's hot and humid, so I'm always sweaty. Nonetheless, I love working in the forest. It's mostly a sea of green leaves, but there are endless surprises, unknown
noises, remarkable insects and mammals scurrying by. It's rare to spend a day in the forest without seeing or thinking of something new."
These days, however, Coley said she splits her 60- to 70-hour work weeks. Half the time she does teaching and research in a faculty position she shares with
Kursar. The rest of the time she works on a five-year, $2.5 million project to help boost Panama's economy and save rain forest by showing its value as habitat for plants, fungi and even beetles that might produce new medicines against cancer, AIDS and tropical diseases.
Coley is acutely aware that the promise of such "bioprospecting" was overhyped in the 1990s. Roughly one in 300,000 plant species with potentially active
compounds gets developed into drugs, and it takes 10 to 20 years for royalties to trickle back to the nation where the plants were discovered, she said.
Treaties now give nations sovereign rights to their biological diversity, so drug companies must negotiate to seek plant extracts. Most companies find it cheaper to
examine known chemical compounds and modify them to design new medicines, she said.
To date, "no drugs have made it to market from early bioprospecting efforts, although there are some patents and drugs in the pipeline," Coley said. "No
royalties from marketing those drugs have gone back to source countries. Host countries have not received any tangible benefits."
Checking Their Defenses: So Coley, Kursar and former U. biologist Todd Capson are trying a new approach. They use their knowledge of plant defenses against
insects to zero in on plants that are more likely to yield new medicines. And they are trying to get economic benefits to Panama more quickly by training scientists and equipping laboratories in that nation to test, extract and purify medicinal compounds.
"Our goal is to have high-profile jobs dependent on rain forests, so there will be a small biotech industry dependent on the rain forest," Coley said. "It hasn't
stopped logging yet. . . . This is not going to happen overnight. We are talking about a five- to 10-year project. We're hoping this can be a model other countries can
follow."
Paul Cox, an ethnobotanist on leave from Brigham Young University, said most of the world's biodiversity is "found in poorer countries that often lack the scientific
infrastructure to carefully assess the value of their biological holdings."
So Coley's efforts to equip Panamanian scientists to look for new medicines "seems an excellent approach to assessing the value of plant biodiversity," Cox said.
"Trained local investigators, because of their familiarity with the culture, are far more likely to discover plant uses of importance to the local country than foreign
scientists," he said.
Cox said the approach taken by Coley's group "has a good chance of helping improve the lives of normal Panamanians and perhaps people around the world. . . .Coley and her collaborators are likely to slow the rate of deforestation."
"Bioprospecting by itself will not save the rainforest, but combined with other activities, it will," said Marianne Guerin-McManus, conservation finance director for Conservation International, a Washington group involved in Coley's project and bioprospecting efforts in Madagascar and Suriname.
Other approaches include ecotourism, watershed protection and sustained harvesting of plants, spices and nuts, she said.
Guerin-McManus said Coley's "wonderful" project not only "builds the scientific capacity of Panama," but "increases tremendously the level of awareness of the value of the rain forest at the national and international level," creating incentives to save it.
Taking the Lab to the Forest: Coley and Kursar -- an associate professor of biology spending most of this month in Panama -- came to Utah in 1981.
For 20 years, they studied how plants defend themselves against insects in forests in Borneo, Malaysia, Madagascar, Cameroon, Zaire, Suriname, Peru, Bolivia,
Venezuela and, mostly, Panama, which has great biodiversity. And they watched forests destroyed by logging.
Prodded by midlife crises and a desire to save forests, Coley, Kursar and Capson "hatched this plan of moving the drug discovery process to Panama," Coleysaid.
For a few years starting in 1994, the trio scrounged money, obtaining $70,000 from the U.'s Huntsman Cancer Institute and another $70,000 from a conservation group in Panama. Coley said Capson was hanging sheetrock to help finance the effort.
During 1996-97, Coley, Kursar and Capson recruited scientists and government support in Panama. During 1997-98, they wrote a 350-page grant application,
persuaded St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. to get involved and gained support from Panama's government.
In late 1998, the Utah biologists won a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
Capson quit the U. to devote full time to the effort, which is based at the Smithsonian Institution's Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Coley and Kursar
spend four or five months a year in Panama.
The researchers still are negotiating complex legal agreements with project participants, including Monsanto, so no samples of promising plant extracts have been sent
to the company yet.
"We're hanging up over royalties and other benefits they will give to Panama," Coley said.
Nevertheless, Monsanto has helped train Panamanians and gave the project expensive equipment, she added.
"At the moment, we have about 30 people in Panama collaborating in this project" in six laboratories, including five at the University of Panama.
There, plant extracts are tested against lung, breast and nervous-system cancer cells provided by the National Cancer Institute. Another group is testing plant extracts
against aphids and whiteflies, "which are major agricultural pests worldwide," Coley said. Genes from such plants might be inserted into crop plants to make them
pest-resistant.
A third group at the university tests plant compounds against deactivated AIDS virus samples. A fourth lab helps study if beetles contain chemicals that could
combat disease. The fifth group purifies plant extracts.
A research team at Panama's Gorgas Memorial Institute for Health Research is developing tests to determine if plant extracts can combat tropical parasitic diseases
such as malaria, leishmaniasis and Chagas' disease.
Coley said the project identifies a higher proportion of potentially medicinal plants by focusing on fresh leaves from young plants, which have higher biological
activity than dried leaves from mature plants, which is what drug companies often tested.
Mining Tribal Knowledge: The Utah biologists and Conservation International also operate a "shaman's apprentice" program with Panama's Naso Indians. Coley
said eight tribal young people are making written records of their elders' knowledge of traditional, plant-based medicines. The tribe will decide later whether to share
that knowledge with the Utah group or other bioprospectors, she added.
She acknowledged the project's ultimate goal is to create a forest-based drug industry more lucrative than logging Panama's forests, and "at the moment, we are not
there."
She hopes that with more funding after the current five-year grant, the project "will be far enough along in the process of drug discovery that we will have things in
the pipeline that will generate revenue -- compounds that foreign pharmaceutical companies will be interested in purchasing."
Originally published April 13, 2000, in The Salt Lake Tribune.
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