Small plants with mighty potential.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT - Great Lakes Forestry Centre

There's a vast storehouse of knowledge in the basement of the Great Lakes Forestry Centre (GLFC).

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Refrigerators contain close to 1,000 samples and extracts collected from trees, shrubs and herbs from across Northern Ontario.

There's binders lining the shelves cataloguing and "fingerprinting" all the active ingredients in hundreds of natural compounds, meticulously recording the location and date they were gathered.

It's a collection of raw data that could be the building blocks for the next cancer-fighting drug, for treating neuro-degenerative diseases or for pain-killing medications.

Asked to estimate the value of his plant library, scientist Dr. Mamdouh Abou-Zaid shrugs and says "maybe $50, maybe $1 million. Nobody knows."

And nobody from Big Pharma has shown up with a big cheque in hand yet.

But the pharmaceutical industry is always looking for new leads. About 70 per cent of the drugs in the marketplace either come from plants or plant modifications.

"The most successful cancer drugs are from plants," says Abou-Zaid.

He's collaborating with Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) as the director of what's being called the Boreal Bioprospecting Initiative. It's the search and identification of new chemicals in living things that will have medical use.

Abou-Zaid had been quietly going about his collection and analysis research work across Northern Ontario for 15 years.

It's been far-reaching work; collecting branches, twigs, bark, needles, fungi, insects, basically everything that grows and crawls inside and out of a plant.

It's about understanding how these organisms interact with the environment.

In the 1990s, Abou-Zaid's bio-prospecting work was related to pest management control. Forestry researchers wondered why the forest tent caterpillar attacked and fed on sugar maple trees and not red maples?

Often, Abou-Zaid says, researchers don't know where their work is leading to.

But the identification of paclitaxel (as known as Taxol) from Canada yew caused many to ask what else is out there in the bush?

"Taxol is a model project to illustrate the importance of the boreal forest as a source for treating diseases," says Abou-Zaid, who worked with Ottawa's Ensyn Technologies in developing a patent for a Taxol extraction method from yew.

Today, most of his five-member team's work is geared toward identifying the class of compounds that have potential for anti-oxidant activity and anti-cancer compounds.

Abou-Zaid and...