African researchers are turning to the continent’s rich reservoir of medicinal plants to develop new locally produced drugs as growing pandemic outbreaks and global antimicrobial resistance continue to ail health systems.
For generations, the African wormwood plant or Artemisia afra has played a vital role in traditional African medicine, valued for its effectiveness in treating ailments such as coughs, colds, influenza, and malaria. Its significance gained global attention when laboratory tests revealed that its extracts possess some potential to inhibit coronavirus.
African researchers are now turning to the continent’s medicinal plants treasure chest to develop new drugs locally, as increasing pandemic outbreaks and global antimicrobial resistance continue to ail health systems.
The Kenya Medical Research Institute now has a Center for Traditional Medicine and Drug Research that conducts scientific studies on traditional medicines with the aim to integrate them into the country’s health care system. Burundi is extracting essential oils from the catnip plant to develop a mosquito repellent. And at least 15 plant species from southern Africa applied in traditional medicine have been fully or partially commercialized.
Researchers from the medical research consortium Afrique One have partnered with the West African Traditional Healers Association to study and validate Africa’s traditional remedies, professor Bassirou Bonfor, director of the consortium told Devex.
“We are in a complex health system where we have emergence of diseases but our health systems are not able to address these outbreaks. If we have a poor health system the first discourse is the knowledge we have in hand in our medicinal plants,” Bonfor said.
Cholera continues to be a persistent concern in many African countries, while malaria, dengue fever, cancer, and HIV remain formidable challenges. Adding to these ongoing health crises is the emergence of new COVID-19 strains and deadly outbreaks of mpox and Marburg virus.
The challenge of disease outbreaks has been worsened by the growing antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, which is now considered a global threat, where low- and middle-income countries face the greatest risk.
AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve and develop resistance to medications that were previously effective in killing them or stopping their growth. This makes infections harder to treat and increases the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death.
The African continent accounts for the highest number of AMR deaths globally — 27.3 deaths per 100,000 people. Studies have linked the lack of innovation aimed at discovering new treatments as one of the reasons AMR burdens African countries.
Experts say this could change, if Africa pushes ahead with plans to develop new cures from its medicinal plants, and for a good reason. Of the 45,000 plant species, or 25% of the world’s plant genetic resources found in Africa, 5,000 of them have for generations been used in traditional and modern medicine. Some of these plants stirred Bonfor and his team’s curiosity after observing sick chimpanzees in West Africa for a year. The primates would pick specific plants, consume them and get well.
The researchers studied 27 of these plants to investigate their antimicrobial potential against E. coli, the hospital bug, staph bacteria, yeast, the fungus Candida tropicalis, and the yeast pathogen Candida glabrata, formerly known as Torulopsis glabrata. They pulled 132 extracts from the plants and after studying them found that 24 extracts stopped bacteria from multiplying.
While a review of the potential of select African medicinal plants by the Biomedicines journal — which identified 36 plants with the potential to fight AMR — found that production costs for plant-made drugs would be lower than current industrial production systems, Bonfor said. African medical research institutions lack the capacity and technology to develop plants into drugs locally. This is due to poor funding by both governments and the development community.
Most are forced to take study samples to high-income countries such as Switzerland, which is also home to many pharmaceutical companies, where Bonfor said they face high charges and the risk of exposing their research to patent exploitation.
“In West Africa, we do not have a laboratory that is well equipped to identify the molecules in medicinal plants. We can only extract and stop there because we do not have the means to move forward,” he said.
That is not a fair system, according to Greenpeace Africa, which accuses Big Pharma of extracting free genetic data from African medicinal plants. After developing drugs and cosmetics, they make huge profits without having paid a penny for the raw materials. Yet they charge exorbitant fees for laboratory services to the continent’s research institutions, which are already struggling financially, Aliou Ba, the ocean campaign lead at Greenpeace Africa, said.
This has sparked an awakening by activists, whose intense lobbying at the biodiversity COP16 led to the establishment of the first global fund for companies using genetic data to contribute to, named the Cali Fund, along with a multilateral mechanism to support it.
Countries from which the genetic resources are extracted will get some allocation from the Cali Fund, and that is a good thing for African research institutions which often complain of underfunding from the global development community, Ba said.
According to him, this is an opportunity for governments to support local research, especially in the development of medicinal plants into products that can help Africa cope with the growing disease burden.
There is a possibility for African governments to be able to fund local research from this fund and support local health systems held by Indigenous people. But it should be accessible for it to be able to do that,” Ba said.
Source: devex.com
