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Originally Posted by fearn
Speaking as one of those scientists (I'm a trained botanist), there's this one little problem with that statement. It's incomplete.
Yes, few plants have been tested. There's a reason. Some plant families are rich in drug-type chemicals. The tomato family is a good example of this, and has given us atropine, scopalamine, nicotine, etc. Some families are not rich.
Basically, the are ~800 species of figs in the tropics, and there are hundreds of species of oaks. The chemistry of both groups is known fairly well, they're pretty consistent among species and they're not good sources for new drugs. I could go on at length, but the reason no one is checking the plants that we know about is because there's a very low probability that we'll find anything new in them ...
Bioprospecting goes in and out as a fad among drug companies. Right now, they're bioprospecting in the ocean and in animals, because they're finding new classes of pain killers (cone snails) and antibiotics (frogs, alligators, etc) to study. I'm sure that they will eventually go back to the rainforests, but even then, they're probably going to be looking at things like fungi, bacteria, and animals, as much as the plants.
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Thanks for those comments.
Can I just request for your comments please on my two back-of-the-envelope calculations?
Here's quick-and-dirty calculation no. 1 --
[a] there are currently about 13,000 drugs per US Food & Drug Admin., if I understood correctly
this webpage;
[b] if the stat we picked up was correct in that 25% of Western drugs came from rainforest ingredients, then that would be 3,250 out of the 13,000;
[c] again if it's true that only 1% of rainforest flora has been tested, then shouldn't that mean that the 99% untested plants ought to give us thousands of more new drugs?
On the one hand, I myself like anybody else will find it ridiculous if someone will say that we expect to see 321,750 new drugs (i.e., 99 x 3,250) once the remaining 99% have been tested.
On the other hand, if we are to say that no significant new drugs are to be expected from the 99%, wouldn't that be swinging to the opposite extreme?
After all, the 1% tested did yield 3,000+ drugs.
Could it be that the most likely scenario will be somewhere in between? (though perhaps skewed towards the scenario you just described, in that the success rate will be much lower this time, on account of the similar traits of many species, etc.).
Just thinking out loud ...
I'll post next that second rough calcs
