Lexington, KY - The worlds of medicine and agriculture may seem on the surface to be very different, but the two actually have enjoyed a relationship dating back at least to the beginnings of recorded human history.

A research project that includes the University of Kentucky (UK) is showing just how important that relationship can be.

The major goal of the Medicinal Plant Consortium (MPC) has been to capture the genetic blueprints of medicinal plants for the advancement of drug discovery and development, according to Joe Chappell, a professor at the UK College of Agriculture's Department of Plant and Soil Sciences and project coordinator.

He said it is important to first understand the problem in explaining what the project research could help solve.

"Over the last 20 years, the pharmaceutical complex has come up with a problem in that the new drugs feeding into the assessment and clinical evaluations have narrowed down tremendously," Chappell said. "That's because of a technical shift in how people thought about drug development."

He also said that drugs often have particular targets within the human body such as cancer or any variety of diseases and many of those medicines have been created from synthetic means over the last two decades. Chappell said that has been spectacular in terms of the number of different chemicals that can be made but it has been equally as spectacular how unsuccessful efforts have been in finding chemicals that meet standards for drug development.

"We're always looking for better, more efficacious drugs for all of these (diseases)," he said. "Many of the drugs that we utilize actively now,- about two-thirds of them - are inspired or developed from natural sources and these drugs are very rich in their structural diversity."

As the synthetic avenue for drug development has dried up, the desire to look back at more natural means of chemical development for drugs through plants has reoccurred.

Using plants in some form of medical treatment is hardly new. In fact, plants have been used possibly since pre-historic times to treat a variety of ailments. The difference now is the technology available to dig deeper into the structure and characteristics of plants, searching for the right compounds to create more potential for increased drug development. As Chappell put it, today's sophisticated technologies can help prospect these valuable elements from plant materials.

"That's the backdrop for our project and for a lot of efforts in the pharmaceutical industry; to kind of go backwards, if you will, to some of the means in which people were getting drugs very regularly for various disease states and those proved to be very effective and potent in that capacity," he said.

Chappell noted an example using the Foxglove plant, which produces a chemical commonly used for heart drugs. But plants often contain a suite or family of chemicals that could potentially produce many different kinds of drugs.

"What our technology has been about is trying to help uncover some of those other chemicals such that the medical community can now start to access some of these derivatives of these known, very potent pharmaceutical compounds and have access to those in a way that would allow them to test for new disease indications," he said. 

Chappell emphasized that while the project is looking at the age-old technique of utilizing plants for medicine, the research will move forward the discovery of new compounds for medicine.

"I'll call it going back to our roots. We're trying to use that rich experience base probably practiced for hundreds if not thousands of years by man and successfully so," he said. "We're just trying to take that kind of experience base and amplify off of it to give us additional opportunities as we go forward."

Chappell pointed out that agriculture and the appreciation for plants goes hand-in-hand with medicine and can be much more beneficial to civilization and society in general by combining those interests.

"We hope to help demonstrate that we can take the previous wealth of knowledge of plants and fuse it with technological developments to now avail great resources to the medicinal applications," he said. "The current strategy of relying on purely synthetic routes has not been very fruitful so we've got to consider some alternative means."

The project will end on Aug. 30, 2012 and has had specific goals to meet within its two year timeframe.

"We had very specific tools to develop and to make those available to the worldwide research community," Chappell said. "What we proposed was to develop a resource and then to make that resource available to everybody and we've largely accomplished that already." 

Besides UK, partners participating in the MPC project include Michigan State University, Iowa State University, the University of Mississippi, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England.

The two-year project was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by way of a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

To learn more about the MPC and the resources provided go to the following websites:
http://medicinalplantgenomics.msu.edu; http://metnetdb.org/mpmr_public/.