Health
A Positive Aids Connection
Samoan Healers Recognized for Thousand-Year-Old Knowledge
Samoa has signed a landmark agreement with a U.S. research group that will guarantee 20 percent of revenues received from the development of an experimental but promising anti-HIV/AIDS compound from the bark of a Samoan tree called “mamala.” The experimental compound is called Prostratin.
The research group, AIDS ReSearch Alliance of America (ARA), announced in December that the agreement will return 20 percent of any commercial revenues derived from the use of this compound to the people of Samoa who helped American researchers discover the plant-derived therapy.
ARA says the agreement provides a share in the potential proceeds from the first compound ever licensed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for development by a non-profit research institution.
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In an earlier statement to the Samoa News, Dr. Amituana’i Nanai R. Iosefa, a retired internist, said that the federal government’s Office of Technology Transfer granted ARA an exclusive license to develop Prostratin. Iosefa said NIH screened Prostratin for anti-HIV activity and the compound was determined to have anti-HIV properties. Iosefa said the recent research completed by ARA suggested that Prostratin not only kills HIV, but also may help purge the viral reservoir.
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“This was a goal that researchers have so far been unable to attain,” he told the newspaper. “We are thrilled with the agreement,” adds Samoa’s Minister of Trade and Tourism Hans J. Keil. “This is a breakthrough, a plus for indigenous cultures around the world. If Prostratin is successful, the return to Samoa is great, and we will put the sum to good use.”
Signed in September by the ARA and Samoa Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, the agreement gives the Samoan government 12.5 percent of profits. Another 6.7 percent goes to the village on Savai’i, next to the Falealupo Rain Forest, where the healers live who provided the initial health information that eventually led to the pact. The Associated Press reported that the families of two Samoan women, who died in their 80s after passing along their knowledge of the healing powers of the trees, will each receive 0.4 percent. The NIH also gets 5 percent of any profits.
ARA said the agreement is the culmination of years of research by the NCI and the ARA based on a plant collected by Paul Alan Cox, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a congressionally-chartered research institution in Hawaii and Florida dedicated to tropical plant conservation and ethnobotany, the study of how indigenous peoples use plants. Cox found the plant in the village of Falealupo in Savai’i and ARA identified the Samoan plant “mamala” as “Homalanthus nutans.”
A former Mormon missionary with a degree in tropical medicine from Harvard University, Cox spent a year after his mission in 1985 with his wife and four children in a small Samoan village learning from elderly Samoan medicine women. His mother’s death from cancer in 1984 prompted the quest. According to ARA, Cox was responsible, prior to the agreement, for raising over $480,000 to help build schools, clinics, and a rain forest canopy walkway in Falealupo Village.
“These healers were heirs to thousands of years of knowledge,” Cox told the Associated Press. “They were bright people. Talking to them about the plants was like talking to another Ph.D.” Cox found Samoan healers using the bark of the plant to treat hepatitis and sent their mixtures to the NCI, which isolated the Prostratin compound. In licensing the compound for development, NCI requested that there be a negotiation with the Samoan government so that the Samoan people would benefit.
ARA, a non-profit group based in West Hollywood, Calif. licensed Prostratin from NCI to explore the compound’s ability to protect cells from HIV and to activate a virus that lays dormant in the body and beyond the reach of currently available HIV drugs.
Photo: AIDS Research Alliance
