Is the boreal forest the new Amazon rainforest?
That's what the Great Lakes Forestry Centre and Northern Ontario School of Medicine are trying to find out.
Long a source of the anti-cancer compound known as paclitaxel, the boreal forest is now being mined for other biological chemicals that could help mankind.
"Most research in the past, in regard to drug discoveries, went to the Amazon and South America. Recently, instead of going to the Amazon, we have been looking at resources in our own backyard," said GLFC research scientist Mamdouh Abou-Zaid.
GLFC is collaborating with NOSM to launch the Boreal Bioprospecting Initiative. Bioprospecting is the search for economically valuable biological molecules, organisms or genetic materials using non-timber forest products such as trees, mushrooms, herbs and shrubs that could lead to nutritional or medical therapies.
Based on Abou-Zaid's considerable knowledge of disease-preventing antioxidant compounds derived from forests and non-timber forest products, NOSM approached him to be the project's research director. The core of the Boreal Bioprospecting Initiative will be his extensive library of about 1,000 natural product crude plant extracts and 800 purified compounds, many of which are novel natural products with antioxidant properties to prevent and halt damage from diseases triggered by overactive internal defence reactions in our bodies.
In that library could be the key to new therapies for victims of cancer, stroke, Parkinson's disease and the like.
Abou-Zaid already has a few leads, such as the antioxidant properties present in maple syrup.
"The problem is it also contains a lot of sugars," he said with a laugh.
They've also found Northern plants differ from their neighbours to the south in a significant way. With many more predators such as insects and plant-eating animals in South America, plant life there has evolved to develop a "wide range of compounds in low concentrations," he said.
"The boreal forest plant, with its shorter growing season, focuses on producing a high concentration of specific compounds."
NOSM's associate dean of research, Dr. Greg Ross, says Northern Ontario is well positioned to be the provincial hub of a bioproduct and research economy because of the forest and expertise in institutions such as GLFC and the Ontario Forest Research Institute. NOSM has funding applications in to various agencies to to create the infrastructure, primarily based in Sault Ste. Marie, to process and bring the raw material from the boreal forest to the marketplace, while maintaining intellectual property rights in Northern Ontario, Ross said.
He likens the paclitaxel research to a miner panning for gold, while bioprospecting is "far more random" - and potentially far more lucrative.
"We're testing thousands of chemicals for certain diseases. We're in a really high-stakes, high-risk venture, but if you're successful, you now have the intellectual property."
At this stage, paclitaxel (which is marketed under the brand name Taxol) remains Northern Ontario's greatest pharmacological export. In co-operation with an Ottawa-based company, Ensyn Technologies, Abou-Zaid has applied for an international patent to more efficiently extract paclitaxel from the needles and twigs of the eastern yew. The method they've developed is called byrolysis, which in its simplest terms exposing the plant to a few seconds of heat to release the taxanes into an oil.
The impetus is both economic and environmental. Abou-Zaid estimates we currently utilize just two per cent of chemical-rich plant material from an available 10 per cent, using "harsh solvents" to boot.
"Canada produces a fair bit of Taxol but you reach the point where you need to make a little bit of an advance in the technology over the others. . . . We are competing worldwide."The Salut Star
