Traditionally, prospecting in Panama has meant panning in gravel beds at the bends of streams, and when gold is found in such places, searching the banks and watershed for outcroppings of purplish-red soil and rocks, likely places to find veins of the metal that the Indians said drove white men crazy. Or else it has meant looking for greenish stains on the land, the tell-tale sign of copper oxide, and thus copper ore, which in Panama frequently contains a bit of silver, and sometimes also gold.
But that was then. Science and technology have progressed since the Spanish Conquest. New tastes and needs have been acquired. We caught up with one of the modern breed of prospectors recently, when bioprospector Todd Capson spoke at a November 11 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute lecture.
“When you see fluffy coral in a mangrove swamp full of fishes and they are not being eaten, something is protecting them,” Capson noted. That, he said, is one of the signs that the coral contain some sort of biological agent that might be useful as a medicine or pesticide.
Capson is part of an effort to organize International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBGs) that involve multinational pharmaceutical companies, universities here and abroad, such US governmental institutions as the Smithsonian and the National Institute of Health, and Panamanian public entities like the National Environmental Authority (ANAM). The aim is to discover, extract and test useful chemicals found in nature.
“Bioprospecting has potential because everybody’s concerned about their health,” Capson explained, noting that about 45 percent of the world’s best-selling drugs come from natural products. The drug discovery process is complex, he said. “One of the key steps is identifying the active ingredient, which you can patent.”
The patenting of biological assets is a political, economic and legal minefield. Mainly for that reason, Capson and the folks he works with --- mostly backed by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis --- stay away from Panama’s traditional medicine scene. “It’s a very murky world when you try to mix traditional knowledge with modern science,” he opined. It’s not only a matter of different world views, but also a corporation’s legal dilemma of trying to claim or buy an exclusive license to inventors’ rights over something that has been in tribal pharmacopoeia for generations.
Instead, Capson and his associates look exclusively in Panama’s national parks, pursuant to government permits, for natural substances whose properties have not so far been tested or used. He said they do as much of the extraction and isolation work as possible in Panamanian labs so that scientists here will be in a position to get the valuable patents.
Capson himself is interested in developing systematic methods to look for useful naturally occurring chemicals, but the ICBGs here have four main areas of work. First, there is task of collection, with the associated theoretical work of developing ecological theories to make drug discovery more efficient. Second, there is the assessment of the bioactivity of substances collected against tropical parasites, cancer cells and agricultural pests. Third, there is the work of isolating the active constituents of substances that are found to have useful bioactivities, and of determining the chemical structures of these compounds. Finally, there is the work of conservation, outreach, and making an inventory of the area’s biodiversity.
What are the stakes? For example, Capson noted that “malaria is the most important parasitic disease in mankind,” an infestation by blood parasites that have “learned how to outwit the human immune system.” In some of the research that is being done on blue-green algae --- seaweed --- found in one of our national parks, a promising anti-malarial compound has been found. It’s a lead, and there will be many hurdles to jump before it might be found “safe and effective” and be licensed as a legal medicine. (The patenting process comes relatively early in the game. Just because some newly discovered chemical receives a patent as something novel and useful does not mean that it will ever make it through clinical trials and onto the market.)
The search is also on in earnest for new treatments for chagas disease and leishmaniasis, two other parasitic tropical diseases that are devastating over wide areas of the developing world and for which medicine has no good remedies.
And what happens if some type of coral found around Coiba turns out to cure lung cancer, or if the bark of some understory shrub in Cerro Campana National Park is found to be the source of an ideal treatment for chagas disease? That becomes a good argument to protect the coral reefs around Coiba, or the forest on Cerro Campana, of course. Capson pointed to the Pacific yew, an understory shrub thought to be a nuisance by loggers until a few years ago, when it was found that its bark and needles contain a compound that’s useful in the treatment of certain cancers. Now the yews are no longer systematically eliminated to ease access to the timber, and those species that benefit from having Pacific yews in their ecological niches have reason to be grateful.
The ICBGs here in Panama do much of the bioassay work at the University of Panama, with Novartis handling a lot of the cancer research and Dow AgroSciences looking into pesticide applications. Half of any proceeds from resulting compounds that make it to the market will go to a consortium of the institutions involved in the research, 20 percent goes into an ANAM forest protection fund, and 30 percent to the Fundacion Natura.
What’s the weak point in Panama’s share of the research effort? Capson said it’s in the field of chemistry. Thus a lot of the work of determining the chemical structures of active compounds found in our natural environment remains in the hands of foreign experts.
What’s the biggest asset we have to protect? Coiba and its surrounding waters, Capson suggested. He noted that the island is at the center of the world’s most biologically diverse tropical marine area, and that most of the island is covered with relatively undisturbed forests that have not been studied by biologists.
Also in this section:
Bioprospecting in Panama
Diabetes warning
