london

Sharp controversy over the ‘ownership’ of natural products in Africa (see page 540) does not seem to have dented the popularity of the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG), an expanding network of bioprospecting projects sponsored by the US government through the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

ICBG projects aim to find plants with ingredients that could treat priority diseases in the United States. Four ICBG networks operate in Latin American countries. But the largest one is in Africa, taking in Nigeria and Cameroon.

Countries hosting the projects can expect financial rewards for local people, investment in research into priority diseases, a share in royalties from sales of drugs and strengthening of local institutions engaged in research and traditional medicine.

The scheme is popular. Thirty-four projects from 25 countries — mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean — entered in the last wave of applications. Even more have applied for the next tranche, out of which six will be chosen. Each project receives about US$500,000 a year — a sum that the ICBG's programme manager Josh Rosenthal acknowledges could be bettered.

The projects involve collecting samples from medicinal plants by, for example, negotiating access to traditional healers' associations, herbal gardens and pharmacies. In return, the healers are paid a fee, and are advised on primary health care, offered help with setting up apprenticeship schemes in traditional healing and with testing the ingredients of their remedies.

As far as possible, local laboratories are used to analyse plants for potentially useful compounds, and for fractionation to isolate those compounds. Further analysis, and clinical trials on compounds with potential anti-viral or anti-cancer activity, is carried out in the United States by public- or private-sector laboratories.

If a compound were to lead to a successful drug, the bulk of royalties would be invested in the host country. In Africa, 20 per cent would go to the inventors, 50 per cent into a community development trust fund run by local people and 30 per cent towards research into tropical diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute.

The private sector's degree of involvement provides the essential difference between ICBG projects in Africa and Latin America. Latin American projects involve private-sector companies upfront. This is not the case in Africa, where governments are more wary of foreign multinationals and where the issue of patenting is more sensitive (see page 540).

In Africa, where much thinking has gone into the design of ICBG projects, private-sector involvement is restricted to contract laboratories. “Governments are far more comfortable dealing with governments,” says Maurice Iwu, a key player in ICBG Africa and director of the Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme in Lagos.

Similarly, botanic gardens, given the controversial nature of their previous involvement in Africa, have not been invited to participate in the projects. “Basically, we have learnt from history,” says Iwu.

But some remain unconvinced by the ICBG. Tewolde Berhan Egziabher, for example, general manager of Ethiopia's environmental protection agency, and a key figure in the draft OAU convention on access to genetic resources, describes the ICBG approach as “an improvement in garb, but not in substance”.

“In the past, research organizations from overseas would simply walk off with our plants. Some still do,” he says. “I would like to believe that there is goodwill, and that institutions from countries such as the United States are working in our interests. But history tells me something else. Which is why I have yet to be convinced.”

But Iwu says that in his experience, attitudes to conservation and development in the United States and in European countries are changing. Government agencies appear keen not to repeat past mistakes. He says they are prepared to listen more and dictate less. And he says it is up to Africa's governments to rise to the challenge, and derive maximum benefit from this new climate of partnership.