In the first BYU-Hawaii Honors program lecture of 2007, Dr. Paul A. Cox, Executive Director of The Institute for EthnoMedicine, outlined the progress being made on developing a potential anti-AIDS drug from a plant used by traditional Samoan healers and ongoing research on an amino acid linked to significant increases in ALS-type degenerative diseases in Guam and other places.
Cox — former Director and CEO of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens on Kauai, BYU-Hawaii Distinguished Professor of Ethnobotany and a member of the Laie-based Hawaii Reserves, Inc. board of directors — explained "ethno refers to indigenous people, ethnobotany is the study of how indigenous people use plants, and ethnomedicine is the study of the healing practices of indigenous people. Our not-for-profit mission is to search for new cures by studying patterns of wellness and diseases among indigenous people."
For example, he told of a "gifted Samoan healer" in Falealupo, Savaii, who rubbed extract from the small rain forest tree they call mamala (Homalanthus nutans) on the forehead of an ailing man to heal him. Cox explained an average plant can have "four-or-five-thousand molecules in it which are therapies or threats. About half of all of our medicines issued in the United States come from plants and other biological organisms."
"I was extremely interested when the healer told me they could use a tea made from this plant to treat hepatitis with one or two doses," Cox continued, pointing out that after bio-assaying mamala, he and colleagues at the National Cancer Research Center "discovered a new anti-AIDS drug called Prostratin." Tests on mice showed the drug also reduced cancerous tumors that had been induced. "We suddenly had two very potent activities in a test tube, in vitro, one against the AIDS virus in particular and broad anti-viral activities, and the second one was anti-cancer activities."
When the U.S. government wanted to patent the drug, Cox negotiated intellectual rights that benefit the government of Samoa, the village of Falealupo and some of the healers. He added approximately $500,000 in various benefits have so far gone back to the village through the nonprofit Seacology Foundation, which has since expanded its involvement to many other locations.
"Phase I Prostratin exists, enough to run Phase I trials this year in Los Angeles," Cox said, adding he is also working to establish a village-based drug industry to grow mamala "to maintain a cash flow back to...the people I admire and respect." The chief's council have responded by telling him, "If this genetic engineering is so important, then we want our children learning it."
Consequently, Cox continued, "UC Berkeley agreed to accept Samoan students into their program to train in genetic engineering. That's quite an interesting thing, because there might be some Samoan students at this institution who could qualify."
Cox also said, at the request of the Samoan government, BYU graduate Dr. Gaugau Tavana, who worked as Cox's assistant in Kauai, and other foundation staff have been helping the people survey and determine the best-Prostratin-yielding mamala plants, and establish a laboratory in Samoa.
"We found some huge variances," he said, explaining the high-yield plants are used for further promulgation, while the contrasting low-yield plants are also very useful for rapid gene-mapping purposes.
"We've discovered that Falealupo, where the drug was first discovered, has the highest yielding plants... So far it looks like young plants produce the most, and that's exciting," Cox said, noting that one gram of pharmaceutical-grade Prostratin currently costs about $25,000. "By training the Samoans to add as much value as possible within Samoa, they will accrue maximum benefits."
Cox cautioned that the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has yet to "approve this drug for testing in people."
Turning to Guam, Cox said he has been studying "an unusual cluster of illnesses [similar to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is sometimes called Lou Gehrig's Disease] among the Chamorro people in the Marianas islands and we made a real breakthrough in understanding it."
In Umatac, Guam, for example, "the people suffer a neurological illness at about 50-100 times greater than anywhere else in the world," Cox said. "The illness sometimes looks like Lou Gehrig's Disease, sometimes looks like Alzheimer's, and sometimes looks like Parkinson's Disease. Some individuals have all three. It's a devastating disease."
When it was suggested the disease might be tied to the seeds of a cycad tree which the people use to make a flour for tortillas, Cox explained his team got very interested in its beta-N-methylamino-L-alanime (BMAA) molecule.
"We found that it could be magnified by animals eating the cycad bean, particularly flying foxes. We traced this to the Chamorro practice of eating flying foxes. They cook them in coconut cream and then eat them, fur and all," Cox said. He added that tests showed the effect of BMAA ingested in this fashion could be 1,000 times stronger than eating the flour. He also said the effects may take many years to display.
Cox further said a similar situation is occurring among people in Kii, Japan, who eat a certain type of fish exposed to algae blooms in their bay.
"So what does this mean?" Cox asked. "We believe right now that all of us are being exposed to very small amounts of BMAA, unlike the Chamorro islanders and the Kii villagers, who are getting massive amounts. For most of us it's no problem: we metabolize and excrete it." For a small number of people, he believes, "it's a genetic problem."
"We have invented a test to identify these people...and if our hypothesis is correct, we think we can predict long in advance people who are at risk for ALS. We think we've stumbled on a bio-marker," Cox said, adding other researchers do not agree with the scientific papers they have published so far.
"We're basically the only group saying there's an environmental trigger. We're trying to...move these ideas as fast as we can so they actually influence patient outcome."
"We're very small, but we're in a really exciting phase," Cox said, suggesting that some BYU-Hawaii students might want to consider interning on the project.