Sustainable drugs and global health care

Abstract

Each day, Earth's finite resources are being depleted for energy, for material goods, for transportation, for housing, and for drugs. As we evolve scientifically and technologically, and as the population of the world rapidly approaches 7 billion and beyond, among the many issues with which we are faced is the continued availability of drugs for future global health care. Medicinal agents are primarily derived from two sources, synthetic and natural, or in some cases, as semi-synthetic compounds, a mixture of the two. For the developed world, efforts have been initiated to make drug production "greener", with milder reagents, shorter reaction times, and more efficient processing, thereby using less energy, and reactions which are more atom efficient, and generate fewer by-products. However, most of the world's population uses plants, in either crude or extract form, for their primary health care. There is relatively little discussion as yet, about the long term effects of the current, non-sustainable harvesting methods for medicinal plants from the wild, which are depleting these critical resources without concurrent initiatives to commercialize their cultivation. To meet future public health care needs, a paradigm shift is required in order to adopt new approaches using contemporary technology which will result in drugs being regarded as a sustainable commodity, irrespective of their source. In this presentation, several approaches to enhancing and sustaining the availability of drugs, both synthetic and natural, will be discussed, including the use of vegetables as chemical reagents, and the deployment of integrated strategies involving information systems, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and detection techniques for the development of medicinal plants with enhanced levels of bioactive agents.

Alice, Benzene, and Coffee: The ABCs of Ecopharmacognosy

“…The economic and health care outcome gaps between traditional medicine and allopathic medicine globally are vast [30,[42][43][44][45][46][47]. The additional challenges for enhancing TM based on an evidencebased, patient-centered approach entail an exploration from a scientific perspective of the many myths which are associated with, and in some respects inhibit, unbiased TM research and development [32][33][34], to address the desperate need for quality control systems for TMs [13,29,31,33], and to examine the profound necessity to assure the supply of critically-needed traditional medicines through sustainable sourcing [25,26,29,32,33] for the majority of patients in the world. That those situations even exist in the 21 st century reflect another deep-seated "madness", a failure to bring even a semblance of equality to our health-care priorities globally, and an irrational view of natural resource sustainability, namely, the enduring "myth" that the plants will always be there.…”

“…When we speak of "sustainable medicines", the reference is to both natural and synthetic medicinal agents [25][26][27][28]. For the patient, accessibility to treatment is critical for healing, and must embrace both affordability and sustainability.…”

“…As a series of global sciences requiring, as a fundamental aspect of success, the continuing availability and judicious use of natural resources, it was astounding and distressing to acknowledge that pharmacognosy and its practices had barely considered "sustainability" as a conscious and evident component in our daily scientific research ideas and practices. There was a discussion sponsored by the World Health Organization on the conservation of medicinal plants in 1988 [36] and more recently aspects of "sustainable medicines" were discussed [25][26][27][28]; the need for awareness is much greater. Based on this situation, it was deduced that the profile and consciousness of the environmental and sustainability issues surrounding TMs needed to be raised, and hence a new term to integrate philosophy and practice was developed.…”

Sustainable Medicines and Global Health Care

“…In much the same way that a food is labeled now with nutritional value, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in the future will have to establish and declare, what level of depletion of the Earthʼs resources a particular product represents. Some aspects of how synthetic drugs can be made available in a more sustainable manner are discussed elsewhere [6][7][8][9][10], and perspectives on these considerations are embraced by green chemistry. For now, let us turn our attention to traditional medicine and its present and future role.…”

“…In this context traditional medicine is used as a universal term, embracing phytotherapeuticals and certain dietary supplements, as well as the many systems of medicine based on plants, minerals and animals used in various parts of the world. Several recent previous discussions from this author on the development of traditional medicines have focused on aspects of quality control, including safety, efficacy, stability, and plant drug-synthetic drug interactions [6,7,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. These discussions have resulted in proposals for an initial plan for the comprehensive future quality control and development of the medicinal plants used in traditional medicine [6,7,[9][10][11][14][15][16][17].…”