Eddie Koch
It took the Pondo sangoma, Mercy Manci, exactly 40 minutes after walking through a thicket of thorn trees at the entrance of the Klipriviersberg nature reserve south of Johannesburg to locate a plant called ugobo whose root bulbs are used by members of her profession to treat sexually transmitted diseases and to collect a supply of phuzile mlambo fruits which she mixes into a potion that can cure epilepsy.
Until recently, these forays into the veld were considered by scholars to be part of a tradition that relies on mumbo jumbo rather than medical science to treat ailments ranging from diarrhoea to dementia. Yet in the last few months at least four pharmaceutical companies have visited the downtown offices of the Traditional Doctors Association, of which Manci is a member, to ask for help in identifying plants that can be used to manufacture new drugs and medicines.
This sudden interest by mainstream science in the pharmacopeia that South Africa’s healers have gathered over the centuries is part of a multi-billion dollar research drive by multinational companies to learn the secrets of traditional healers around the world before they and the plants they use are lost to history.
At least 200 big pharmaceutical firms, mostly from wealthy nations in the northern hemisphere, are involved in a research race to develop new drugs based on biological riches as diverse as spider venom, tree bark and frogs skins that are fast disappearing in the south — and, in the process, they have whipped up an ethical debate that is beginning to make itself felt in South Africa.
In May this year, for example, researchers from a California-based company called Shaman Pharmaceuticals arrived in this country and made contact with a number of local botanists, research institutes and traditional healers associations. Shaman, which takes its name from an ancient sect of North American Indian trance healers, is at the cutting edge of the new wave of ethnobotany — and the company admits that South Africa’s fantastically rich store of flora along with its thriving healing profession has become a major area of interest.
Shaman has a research team of physicians, anthropologists and botanists who travel the globe in an effort to uncover — much like Sean Connery did in the film Medicine Man — the pharmacological knowledge that lies embedded in the minds of traditional doctors. When they find a plant that at least three groups use for similar treatments, they send samples home for analysis.
According to a recent article in Newsweek magazine, entitled The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, Shaman’s researchers are also combing the copestones of pre- Colombian civilisations in Latin America for clues that could lead to the creation of new drugs. “A lot of drug testing has already been done over the centuries,” says Steven King, Shaman’s head of research.
And by drawing on this store of ancient science, the firm has already patented a compound known as SP303 which is derived from a common — but so far secret — South American plant. It is busy testing an anti-flu and herpes drug that could earn the company billions of dollars a year and is in the advanced stages of research with an antifungal medicine that makes use of compounds found in an as-of-yet unnamed African plant.
Shaman’s chief medical anthropologist, Alondra Oubre (subs: acute accent on the e please), held extensive talks with a traditional healers’ organisation in the Transkei. It has explored the possibility of funnelling some US$2000 to this association, using the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as a funding agency, in exchange for starting collaborative research with these healers and botanists from the University of
Industry sources say chemicals giant Glaxo is also currently prospecting for South African plants and local knowledge about how these can be used for the treatment of human ailments as part of a massive drug development programme that the British multinational is running worldwide. Local pharmaceutical firm Noristan, which has just been bought out by Hoechst, also conducted pioneering research in the 1980s on traditional pharmacopeias in South Africa with a view to using the information for state-of-the-art drug
Noristan has since stopped this programme and handed its data base — which contains southern Africa’s most comprehensive collection of folk medicine date including 46 000 anecdotes and the results on in-house tests on 350 plant species — to the University of Cape Town. That university’s medical school has set up a traditional medicines project, known as Tramed, to systematically collect information on the chemical, toxic and pharmacological properties of local plants.
Tramed researchers have established working links with organisations such as the African National Healers Association and Western Cape Traditional Healers. They plan in the long run to publish a register of indigenous medicinal remedies as well as a vernacular manual for use by traditional healers. A division of the CSIR called Foodtech has plans to set up a bioprospecting unit that will gather data about the many uses indigenous plants have for medicine but also horticulture and food manufacturing.
“Almost every other university now has some form of research relating to traditional medicines in their botany, pharmacology or anthropology departments,” says a scientist from a major South African company working in the field.
At least 122 prescription drugs — including the muscle relaxant curare, malaria-treating quinine and vinblastine derived from Madagascar’s now almost extinct rosy periwinkle to treat lymphoma — are based on substances found in plants. But most of these were developed before the 1960s when research stopped because plants were then extremely difficult to screen and analyze for their medical properties, mainly because researchers relied on painstaking trial-and- error experiments on laboratory animals.
But DNA technology has now made it possible for scientists to screen the therapeutic effects of plants by artificially creating enzymes and cell-receptors that govern diseases and then exposing these to botanical substances. The effects can then be monitored using spectroscopes and powerful computers. “It used to take eight years to isolate a molecule; now they do it in three weeks,” James McChesney, director of the University of Mississippi’s Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently told reporters.
The result: a generation of new drugs such as Shaman’s SP-303 derived from a secret plant that may cure herpes and influenza, Taxol which is manufactured taken from Pacific Yew trees in North America and has recently been approved for treating ovarian cancer, and another compound called CP-02 from a secret South American plant that is undergoing trials for healing serious
But scientists have only analyzed one percent of the world’s 250 000 known plant species and mass-screening is nigh impossible. Hence the great value of indigenous healers and their ancient knowledge of pharmacy. These practitioners provide the vital data and leads that allow the big multinationals to selectively choose plants most likely to produce drug development results.
According to Saliem Fakir, director of a natural resource management programme at the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (LAPC) in Johannesburg, the efficiency of screening plants for medicinal purposes increases by more than 400 percent through the use of knowledge in the possession on sangomas and other healers. “The current value of medicinal products derived through leads given by traditional doctors is valued worldwide to be about US$43-billion,” adds
Many of the companies involved in prospecting for the biological plants and knowledge that are located in poor nations, including firms like Shaman and Glaxo, have begun to develop a set of ethical guidelines designed to ensure that host countries and their healers benefit from royalties, patents and technologies that are developed.
But there have been cases of extreme exploitation. Madagascar’s rosy periwinkle, for example, is almost extinct on the island’s coastline and is now being artificially cultivated in Texas where the company Eli Lilly has never paid a cent to Madagascar for the resource.
Some Third World countries are now cracking down on potential abuse of their “bioresources” by new age medicine men from the corporate world. Brazil and Mexico have banned all exports of plants from their soils while other countries are involved in a tussle with the United States, which in 1992 rejected a biodiversity treaty, that which would have given underdeveloped countries a share in profits and products developed from their natural resources (see accompanying story).
The South African government has, however, hardly begun to examine these issues even though there appears to be an explosion of genetic engineering research in the country. Galvanised by Shaman’s visit to South Africa, and the proliferation of genetic research into the pharmaceutical use of the country’s plant life, the LAPC is coordinating a project designed to produce regulations and a statutory framework to ensure the ethical use of the country’s plants and wildlife.
Some academics are so worried about the laissez faire state of genetic research in the country that they are urging an embargo on the publication of academic articles about the medical uses of indigenous plants until a system is in place that protects sangomas and other healers who own the “intellectual property” of South Africa’s folk medicine. The LAPC — working with researchers from Tramed, Wits University’s medical school, the CSIR, and academics from other parts of the country — plans a “genetic engineering” workshop in February next year that will help devise policy in this neglected field.
In the meantime, healers like Mercy Manci will continue to gather tubers, bulbs, roots and bark from the veld, secure in the belief that big business will never be able to patent the spiritual and cultural beliefs that make their profession so popular in this country. Says Manci: “You have got to be part of the value system, to be psychologically aligned to the spiritual beliefs, for our medicines to work effectively. I am not sure that the companies can do that.”