Genetic Pirates Walk the Plank

As the hunt for natural remedies intensifies, Thailand is battling to protect its treasures, write David Pillinmg and Ted Bardacke.

Deep in the jungles of northern Thailand lurks a plant root that has a miraculous effect on women's breasts.

Pueraria, used by Thais for decades, is a natural oestrogen booster that can enlarge breasts by up tob "one inch in five days", according to Wichai Cherdshewasart, a plant biotechnology expert at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.
The trouble, bemoans Mr. Wichai, is that at least two Japanese pharmaceutical companies have discovered the root's properties and are seeking to patent the active ingredient. According to the Thai government, foreigners are already plundering supplies and theatening the root's survival.

Thailand is so upset by what it sees as "biopiracy" that it is tabling legislation to protect its biodiversity and traditional knowledge of herbal remedies from foreign exploitation. After violating western intellectual property rights for years, Thailand is discovering how it feels to be robbed.

"When drug companies come here and collect samples, they say it is the collective heritage of mankind," says Dr Pennapa Subcharoen, director of the National Institute for Thai Traditional Medicine at the Ministry of Public Health. "Then they study it, develop it, claim intellectual property rights on it and come back to Thailand and make us pay for it."

There is nothing new in such behaviour. For decades international drug companies have scoured the earth for organisms whose active ingredients might prove beneficial.

The female contraceptive pill originates from a natural hormone found in wild Mexican yams. Cyclosporin, the immunosuppressant used in transplant operations, is derived from bacteria found in Scandinavian soil. Metrodin HP, a hormone used in fertility treatment, was originally extracted from the urine of European nuns.

But it is only recently that the issue of payment has cropped up. Drug companies argue that the greatest amount of intellectual property is created in the lab. Of the hundreds of thousands of samples they collect only a few will have pharmaceuti cal use. Even then it takes years of painstaking trials and about $500m (£298m) to produce a marketable drug.

But the search for biological information, from which active ingredients can be synthesised or valuable information extracted, has intensified. The hunt for rare genes has become frantic as understanding of the genetic basis of disease improves. Typical is a Californian company that dis covered two genes impli-cated in asthma by taking blood samples from nearly every inhabitant on the tiny island of Tristan da Cunha.

Merck, the world's biggest drugs company, paid Costa Rica $lm for access to poten-tially useful plants, insects and micro-organisms. Xenova, a UK biotechnology company, is negotiating terms with Mexico to gain access to the Chiapas region, where Mayan inhabitants have a rich knowledge of herbal remedies.
Bronwyn Parry, a Cambridge University research fellow specialising in genetic resources, wonders whether"the flow of material from the gene-rich developing world to the gene-poor industrialised world is a form of bio-colonialism".

She says the Biodiversity Convention, signed by 158 countries since 1992, helps address the issue by making genetic resources part of the
patrimony of the state, instead of being freely available to mankind as before.

According to Ms Parry, the pharmaceutical industry has set compensation for genetic -resources in three stages: an advance of $10-$15 per sample; some training and infrastructure support; and a 1-2 per cent royalty on sales.

But Thailand believes the Biodiversity Convention is not sufficient. It wants the additional security of national laws ta control exports of genetic material.

"We're not trying to stop commercial development and we're not challenging the principle of intellectual property rights, says Dr Pennapa of the Traditional Medicine Institute. "But we don't want to be taken advantage of any more. We pay a lot for drugs and we need to have some rules, some self-de fence."

Like oil-rich nations before them, many developing countries believe they are prey to exploitation because they lack the financial and human resources to profit from their natural bounty. Thailand has fewer than 100 PhDs in genetics and mycology (the study of fungus), and does not have the personnel or expertise to monitor foreign patent applications.

Pueraria is only one of Thailand's biological treasures. In 1975, the active ingredient in Plao-noi, a local herb whose medicinal properties were recorded centuries ago on palm-leaf books, was patented by Sankyo of Japan as an anti-ulcer treatment. And only last month, Portsmouth Uni versity agreed to return 200 marine fungi samples to Thailand after a two-year tussle.

Such incidents have made Mr Wichai suspicious. Thailand, he says, possesses a natural ingredient that has the same effect as Viagra, Pfizer's blockbuster anti-impotence drug. But the name and the whereabouts of that plant he is keeping strictly to himself.