Abstract

Context: Whether natural product drug discovery programs should rely on wild plants collected “randomly” from the natural environment, or whether they should also include plants collected on the basis of use in traditional medicine remains an open question.Objective: This study analyzes whether plants with ethnomedical uses from Vietnam and Laos have a higher hit rate in bioassay testing than plants collected from a national park in Vietnam with the goal of maximizing taxonomic diversity (“random” collection).Materials and Methods: All plants were extracted and subjected to bioassay in the same laboratories. Results of assays of plant collections and plant parts (samples) were scored as active or inactive based on whether any extracts had a positive result in a bioassay. Contingency tables were analyzed using χ2 statistics.Results: Random collections had a higher hit rate than ethnomedical collections, but for samples, ethnomedical plants were more likely to be active. Ethnomedical collections and samples had higher hit rates for tuberculosis, while samples, but not collections, had a higher hit rate for malaria. Little evidence was found to support an advantage for ethnomedical plants in HIV, chemoprevention and cancer bioassays. Plants whose ethnomedical uses directly correlated to a bioassay did not have a significantly higher hit rate than random plants.Discussion: Plants with ethnomedical uses generally had a higher rate of activity in some drug discovery bioassays, but the assays did not directly confirm specific uses.Conclusions: Ethnomedical uses may contribute to a higher rate of activity in drug discovery screening.

Highlights

  • One of the persistent questions in natural product drug discovery has been whether testing plants on the basis of their use for specific diseases in traditional medicine would lead to a higher rate of discovering active lead compounds than testing plants “randomly” from the natural environment, i.e., opportunistically collecting whatever plants are available without regard to traditional use (Farnsworth, 1994)

  • Ethnomedical uses may contribute to a higher rate of activity in drug discovery screening

  • Note in this table that the only ethnomedical collections tested in the HIV assay that have been included in the NAPIS database are those from Laos, while the only collections tested in the chemoprevention assay are from Vietnam

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Summary

Introduction

One of the persistent questions in natural product drug discovery has been whether testing plants on the basis of their use for specific diseases in traditional medicine would lead to a higher rate of discovering active lead compounds than testing plants “randomly” from the natural environment, i.e., opportunistically collecting whatever plants are available without regard to traditional use (Farnsworth, 1994). If ethnomedical information is significantly correlated with activity against such drug development targets, it is hypothesized that the number of plants that would need to be collected and evaluated in order to discover a successful natural product drug could be significantly reduced. This would lead to financial savings and efficiencies in research.

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