The Borderlands
USA/Mexico
The Science
|
|
Mary O’Connell, PhD
|
Mary O’Connell, PhD, is the featured scientist in Ancient Roots, Modern Medicine. She is the founder and director of NMSU’s Medicinal Plants of the Southwest (MPSW). She explains that “The goal of the NIH funded project is to attracted and trained students with the ultimate hope they will pursue PhD degrees in any number of disciplines that are constitute by a medical research, such as Chemistry, Biology, Physiology, medicinal plants, natural products. Chemistry, microbiology, or bioengineering, just to name a few.”
|
|
Students in the MPSW program
|
Dr. O’Connell explains, “The program has special appeal for students from minority cultures. Many students in the Southwest come from cultures that use plants as medicines for improving quality of life issues for reliving minor aches and pains for cuts, for treatments of modest infections and so it’s very, very reasonable to excite these students about how the chemistry in those plants could be studied to have an efficacy in a bio-medical context.”
|
|
At work in the MPSW Laboratory
|
The students at NMSU generate a list of plants to study based on about 100 years of ethno-botanical research. Dr. O’Connell continues “The basis of the hypothesis is that if you use plants as a source of drugs that have been identified by cultures as being important medical agents you increase the odds of finding efficacious chemistries two to three fold, so the drug companies know this factor. Medical communities understand this so what we are hoping to show is that student will learn how drugs are developed by studying the whole process of chemical synthesis. Chemical extraction, analytical tools and then testing those chemistries for their efficacy.”
|
|
Students in the lab
|
Students Scientists in Training
The students spend hours learning precise lab procedures to be used on the plants. For example, they learn how to extract and purify the compounds, and how to identify their structure. They learn what kinds of solvents to use. They also design biological experiments that test for the ability of plant extracts to inhibit the growth of certain microorganisms in a controlled setting.
Dr. O’Connell says her goal in this program is not to discover new drugs. Instead, she wants to
train scientists to go out and do this type of work later in their careers.
View video of Dr. O’Connell talking about discovering new drugs
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
|
|
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
|
For more information about the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center click here:
http://www.fhcrc.org/
Dr. O’Connell has arranged an exciting collaboration with a cancer research center. Presently some NMSU students are taking their plant extracts to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. At the Center, the young researchers work in Dr. Julian Simon’s lab that specializes in drug discovery. Students can screen the compounds extracted from Southwestern plants (in the lab’s anti-cancerous assays.)
|
|
Dr. Julian Simon
|
Dr. Simon says, “Most of our anti cancer drugs, or at least many of them, are derived from natural
sources -- plants and microorganisms. So over the millennium that evolution has worked on these
sources they have developed very sophisticated pathways to produce small molecules what we know as
drugs. And that evolutionary process has yielded things that are very specific. In our action what
we are trying to do is to discover whether that specificity is useful in the treatment of cancer.
There are over a hundred specific diseases that we call cancer, and those all have specific genetic
fingerprints so the likelihood that any singe drug will be active against the whole spectrum of
tumors is small. What we are trying to do is now find match specific medicines with specific genetic
finger prints, to treat cancer.”
View video of Dr. Simon discussing the role of natural herbs in fighting cancer
Dr. Simon says that developing a new drug can take anywhere from 5 to 10 years, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, he sees reason for optimism. “There’s always a chance that medicinal compounds will be found in the most unlikely places.” Who knows, maybe even from a plant the of New Mexico desert!