Northern forests sprout bioprospecting leads.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Northern School of Medicine

The Northern School of Medicine (NOSM) and the Great Lakes Forestry Centre (GLFC) want to serve up their own brand of value-added forestry.

In late May, when medical school officials were finishing up hosting the North's first-ever health research conference in Sault Ste. Marie, and consultants were studying the feasibility of establishing a clinical research centre there, Dr. Greg Ross had bigger things in mind.

From his viewpoint as the medical school's associate dean of research, the northern boreal forest is a vast natural warehouse of untapped plant and micro-organism compounds that could lead to the discovery of new drugs.

And those naturally-occurring compounds might provide fresh leads to stop cancer cells from proliferating, could better treat neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's or possibly identify a new drug that alleviates someone's pain.

"One of the well-recognized challenges for the pharmaceutical industry is their pipeline," says Ross. "These companies all need new leads in novel compounds that may have some medicinal properties."

Ross is in the process of formalizing an agreement that aligns the medical school with the collective brain power of the Sault-based federal laboratory to establish a bioprospecting centre.

A team of GLFC researchers have already compiled a library of thousands of plant compounds that could have far-reaching commercial potential for drug companies.

The bio-medical research movement is gradually gaining momentum in the Sault.

Errol Caldwell, executive director of Science Enterprise Algoma, who is also spearheading a campaign to commercialize government research in the Sault, says bioprospecting is "one of the niche areas that we obviously have some strength in."

The creation of a bioprospecting centre was listed in a June 2005 discussion paper for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine as one of the "enablers" for a sustainable health research strategy in the region.

Bioprospecting is the search for new chemicals in living things that will have some medical or commercial use. Sometimes considered a high-risk investment, it can have massive returns if a new 'wonder drug' is found, not to mention generate significant intellectual property rights.

Canada yew is one of the most successful examples of the returns from bioprospecting. Taxol, derived from northern yew, is the No. 1 drug used in cancer treatment. It's resulted in researchers scouring Northern Ontario looking for Taxol analogues in...