•  caracas
• Thursday, February 10, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Millions of cancer patients around the world benefit from a medication called Paclitaxel (Taxol), which may begin to be produced from a new source: fungi found at the summit of Venezuela's flat-topped mountains. But the indigenous communities who have lived in that area since time immemorial will receive no benefits, and were not even consulted on the matter.

In another case, researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, after signing an agreement with the Venezuelan government in 1998, began to do field work early this decade among Yanomami communities in the extreme southern part of this South American country.

They studied and collected medicinal plants used by the Yanomami, an Amazon jungle people, as well as learning from their strategies of managing these natural resources. 'Our countries are highly vulnerable to biopiracy, to what is practically an invasion by global pharmaceutical companies,' Julio César Centeno, a forestry specialist at the University of Los Andes in Venezuela, told IPS. 'They evade international agreements and take advantage of the weak monitoring of biodiversity in our country.'

María Elisa Febres, a lawyer for the Vitales environmental organisation, told IPS that 'continued efforts to bring this issue to light and to pursue cases in the Andean and Amazon regions has helped bring about progress, like the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol, last October.' The protocol adopted in the Japanese city of Nagoya is aimed at managing access to the natural genetic resources from plants and animals and the sharing of benefits derived by pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies from the use of such resources with the developing nations and indigenous communities where they are found.

Vitalis has documented the case of Taxol, the commercial name under which the New York-based Bristol Myers Squibb registered Paclitaxel, a chemotherapy drug used to treat breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lung cancer, head and neck cancer, bladder cancer, and AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma. It is also potentially useful to treat psoriasis, congenital polycystic kidney disease, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease.

By 2000, Bristol's annual sales of Taxol amounted to nearly 1.6 billion dollars, and by 2003 the drug had been used to treat one million patients. Paclitaxel was originally extracted from the bark of the Pacific yew tree (Taxus brevifolia), native to the northwest coastal region of the U.S.

But it is a small, scarce, extremely slow-growing tree, and the drug's active ingredient is concentrated in the bark, in small quantities (one gram per 14 kilos of bark). That means at least three trees must be destroyed to obtain enough Paclitaxel to treat just one patient.

For that reason, a furor began two decades ago to obtain Paclitaxel from other sources: first, other trees of the genus Taxus, and later from fungi that could be produced more easily and at a lower cost, using biotechnology, said Gary Strobel, a plant biologist at Montana State University.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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