Illumination | Fall 2007

A prime example is quinine, an extract of cinchona tree bark that has been used for centuries to treat malaria. Aspirin, the world's most popular pain reliever, was derived at the end of the 19th century from a compound in willow tree bark. More recently, a natural compound called taxol, produced by the Pacific yew, has become an important cancer-fighting drug.

Long Legacy of Cooperation

Bill Folk, left, and Quinton Johnson, co-directors of The International Center for Indigenous Phytotherapy Studies (TICIPS). Photo courtesy University of Missouri School of Medicine.

CAPE TOWN – At the University of the Western Cape, Bill Folk and Ron Turner are greeted like old friends. "How are things back in Columbia?" asks professor Stanley Ridge when he sees them in the cafeteria.

As a Mark Twain scholar, Ridge has a professional interest in the Show-me State. And as UWC's vice rector, he also has a deep appreciation of the 20-year bond between his institution and MU. It's a relationship Turner helped to build as UM System executive vice president and that Folk is advancing as leader of the TICIPS project. "It's a remarkable success story," says Turner, recalling how the groundbreaking agreement was reached in 1986, at a time when the Board of Curators was under pressure from protesters to remove investments in apartheid-era South Africa. The board not only divested, but also established a direct relationship with UWC, then an under-funded university for "colored" (mixed race) students.

The memorandum of academic cooperation, the first formal link between an American and a South African university, was signed in Columbia by System President C. Peter Magrath and UWC Rector Jakes Gerwel, later a key adviser to Nelson Mandela. In the years since, UWC has been in the vanguard of South Africa's social and educational transformation, with links to two Nobel Prize winners: Bishop Desmond Tutu, UWC's chancellor; and Mandela, who donated some of his papers to the university.

Johnson, whose grandmother was an herbal healer in the Cape Town neighborhood where he spent his childhood, says the use of traditional herbs is not about to disappear in Africa. "Whether or not we conduct clinical trials on these traditional remedies, millions of people will continue to use them," Johnson says. What researchers can do, he adds, is bring scientific evidence to the mix.

When it flowers, Sutherlandia -- known to botanists as Lessertia frutescens -- is an attractive shrub, sprouting scarlet flowers that later bear fruit as inch-long inflated green seed pods that give it the nickname "balloon pea." The plant grows in much of South Africa's Western and Northern Cape provinces, where it is often called the "cancer bush" because residents use it as a tonic to fight weight loss in cancer patients.

The leaves have been used in South Africa as traditional medicines since they were first adopted by the Khoi, San, and Nama peoples. In fact, the traditional Tswana name "phetola" means "it changes" -- implying its effectiveness in treating some conditions. European settlers remarked that the Hottentot tribesmen sipped Sutherlandia teas in the 17th century. It was one of many plants used by African tribes as medicines: Sarcocaulon was taken to stop diarrhea, powdered Berkhya leaves were used to soothe boils, and the wild rosemary plant was prescribed against stomach aches.

"It's clear that Sutherlandia has been used for centuries by traditional healers," says Wendy L. Applequist, assistant curator at the William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, and a partner in the TICIPS effort. The Brown Center is world renowned for its studies of medicinal plants and related topics of ethnobotany, the study of how traditional societies use plants for healing and other purposes.

During a discussion in the garden's research center, Applequist explained that one of her goals in collecting Sutherlandia specimens in South Africa last fall was to determine whether "various populations of this plant are chemically similar."

Gathering a diverse group of samples wasn't easy, as the plants grow in small, widely-scattered populations. Applequist got help from local botanists in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces to find areas where the plants grow. "It was a challenge, but we were able to gather samples from quite a few sites and send them back to labs here and at the UWC," she says.

Another partner in the TICIPS project is the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi, which is studying the composition of chemicals in Sutherlandia. Researchers at the Oxford, Miss., center hope to find a "marker" that is detectable in human blood plasma. That would help confirm that people taking part in a clinical trial are absorbing the plant's ingredients.

"The average plant contains hundreds of chemical compounds, found in suites," says Applequist. "It's a painstaking and expensive process to isolate and characterize those compounds, as well as to find out how they function." She says Sutherlandia contains compounds such as pinitol, which has been shown to benefit some diabetics, and canavanine, an amino-acid analog that can cause problems if taken in high doses.

Published by the Office of Research.