Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 9, 1993 TAG: 9312090060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROLYN CLICK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now, with a five-year, $2.5 million grant, Kingston will lead a team of scientists in the search for rain-forest plants that may provide cures for cancer and other diseases.
The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development are providing the funds for five research projects - including Kingston's - aimed at helping indigenous people preserve habitats. The awards were announced at a Washington news conference Tuesday.
The projects are part of the U.S. government's response to last year's international summit on the environment in Rio de Janeiro and the signing of an international treaty to promote the preservation of the world's biodiversity.
"The tropical rain forest is disappearing at a very steady rate," Kingston said, "and without it, we are losing biodiversity, plant species that may have existed for hundreds, millions of years. We may never see them again once the forest is destroyed."
Kingston will be the principal investigator on a team that will examine plant species from Surinam, on the northeast coast of South America.
"We hope to work with these plants and provide the nation of Surinam with a good, solid reason for keeping its rain forest," Kingston said. Under the conditions of the grant, if drugs are produced from the plant species, some of the royalties will flow back to Surinam.
Other members of Kingston's team include the Missouri Botanical Garden; Conservation International; a Surinamese drug company, BGVS; and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bristol-Myers Squibb will not share in the grant but would profit from any drug finds.
Kingston said a botanist from the Missouri Botanical Garden will be the primary on-site researcher.
Using a global satellite positioning system, the botanist is setting up plots inside the rain forest from which the plants will be collected, then dried for analysis. Because of the precise calculation of the plots, researchers may return to the exact site again and again if more plants are needed.
Conservation International, a conservation organization that has an office in Surinam, will focus on the search for plants with folk medicine uses.
BGVS will prepare plant extracts that will be shipped to Bristol-Myers Squibb and Virginia Tech for chemical analysis.
Kingston, who has been a leader in research on taxol, an anti-cancer compound derived from the bark of the Pacific yew, said he will carry out research on extracts that show anti-cancer activity.
If promising anti-cancer drugs were discovered, they would be licensed to Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Kingston, who holds a doctorate in natural plant chemistry from Cambridge, does not expect overnight miracles in either the discovery of a cancer cure or the international effort to stem rain-forest destruction.
"Five years is too short a time to get a drug on the market," he said, "even if we discovered a drug in the first year of the project.
"Obviously, one can't expect one program to persuade every country in the world that this is going to happen," he said. "The aim of the project is to at least give countries incentive."
Other scientists who won grants will:
Study arid-land plants in Argentina, Chile and Mexico.
Study insects and crustaceans from the dry forests of the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica.
Study plants that have been used medicinally for generations in Andean tropical rain forests in Peru.
Study cures for parasitic diseases from rain-forest plants of Cameroon and Nigeria.
by CNB