Roughly once a month Esta van Heerden’s team of researchers exchange their white lab coats for mining overalls and hard hats to go bioprospecting.
This is when they venture into mine shafts in search of extremophiles — super bacteria that survive the harsh sub-surface conditions.
During these excursions they visit isolated water pockets that are sometimes drilled open during mining activities. Through millions of years of isolation, these pockets contain unique bacteria from which valuable DNA material can be extracted, says Van Heerden, who is associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Free State.
“The best studied bacterium, Thermus scotoductus SA-01, has an optimum growth temperature of 65°C and ‘eats’ and ‘breathes’ … compounds such as sulphates, iron and chromium.” SA-01 therefore has “great potential application” in bioremediation, where biological agents are used to restore contaminated environments in which pollutants such as sulphates are present.
Meanwhile, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, another bioprospector, Professor Nceba Gqaleni, receives regular visits from urban and rural traditional healers who present plant materials and stories of their healing methods to him. “I sit with them and ask [them] to help me understand how they use the plants in their healing,” he says. “It’s often very difficult to take the deep Zulu [terminology] to English.”
As the South African research chair of Indigenous Health Care Systems, Gqaleni uses these visits to try to identify research leads that may help in developing clinically approved medicine against HIV/Aids, TB and cancer. He says it has taken years for traditional healers to come to trust the “mutual education agreement” whereby they can also tap into the expertise at the institution.
Van Heerden and Gqaleni’s research highlights the diversity of research that is done in South Africa under the banner of “bioprospecting” — the exploration of biological material for commercially valuable genetic and biochemical properties. Although a relatively new term, this kind of research has been done for decades. Several developments have, however, put bioprospecting higher on the government’s agenda. These were presented by a panel of experts at a Media Round Table on Bioprospecting, an initiative of the department of science and technology Public Understanding of Biotechnology Programme, in Johannesburg recently.
What emerged was that bioprospecting has a key role to play in solving one of the grand challenges the Science and Technology Department identified in its Ten Year Innovation Plan leading up to 2018, namely to exploit the country’s rich biodiversity for the establishment of a globally competitive pharmaceutical industry.
Dr Vinesh Maharaj, group leader of bioprospecting research at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), agreed that “South Africa does have a competitive advantage”. According to his figures, there are an estimated 24 000 plant species in the country, 3 000 of which are in medicinal use by the roughly 200 000 traditional healers who are consulted by 70% of the population. Unlike some other countries with rich biodiversity, ours “remains largely unexplored for natural medicines” yet offers good access, he says.
Regulation has improved, thereby offering better protection for local communities and catalysing social development. The Biodiversity Act of 2004 came into force last April and requires bioprospectors to obtain a permit for any work that has commercial goals. In addition, the South African Patent Act was amended in 2005 to make specific provision for inventions based on indigenous bioresources or knowledge. This provides a legal framework in which commercialisation can happen.
Apart from protecting the environment, this legislation is also aimed at benefiting communities. Sandra Clelland, a patent attorney specialising in biotechnology says that, in order to obtain a prospecting permit, the prospector must have entered into a benefit- sharing or materials transfer agreement with the relevant community.
Legal specifics are still being sorted out, Clelland says. Although purely academic research doesn’t require a bioprospecting permit, such research might yield a commercial option. Research activities would then need to halt until a permit is obtained, which could take up to two years.
The way forward for this emerging industry is perhaps best summarised by Maharaj: SA has the biodiversity, indigenous knowledge and scientific innovation — “the challenge is how to combine these”.