Small biotech company growing plants for medicinal properties

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Small biotech company growing plants for medicinal properties

Phytomedics extracts from plants compounds used for medicines.

By A.

Of The Associated Press

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. | Inside greenhouses where temperature, humidity

and other factors are meticulously controlled, plants are being turned

into little ''farmaceutical'' factories.

Plant scientists at Phytomedics Inc., a small biotech company started

by a Rutgers University researcher, are making the plants — nature's

original chemists — produce exact concentrations of compounds with

medicinal properties. The compounds, extracted from ground-up plant

matter using solvents, are being used to develop prescription

medicines, dietary supplements, cosmetic ingredients and foods with

health benefits.

Some of these ''botanical therapeutics'' already are being tested on

people. A dietary supplement for preventing diabetes, made from a

variety of the herb tarragon, could be on sale by year's end.

Phytomedics chairman and chief scientist Ilya Raskin, a Rutgers

professor of plant physiology who studied medicine and then developed

crop protection products, co-founded the company in 1996.

The company's name is derived from the Greek words for ''plant'' and

''medicine.''

''It was the combination of many different things I've done in life,

all merging into one idea — that plants can be reconnected with human

health,'' Raskin said.

About one-fourth of today's prescription drugs are based on substances

in plants first used in traditional medicines, according to the World

Health Organization. But nearly all those drugs now are chemically

synthesized instead of putting the plant flowers or leaves into

mixtures such as teas or salves, as folk healers did.

Virtually all those drugs treat diseases with just a single compound,

but that strategy is losing favor as it becomes harder for

pharmaceutical companies to come up with truly new drugs, Raskin said.

One answer is to combine different compounds to fight a disease, just

as AIDS patients take ''cocktails'' of drugs, Raskin said. So

Phytomedics, which has labs at Rutgers and offices in Dayton, N.J.,

extracts mixtures of compounds from the same plant that act together

against disease.

Numerous companies use plants to make medicines and other products,

from makers of herbal supplements to high-tech labs splicing genes into

plants so they produce specific compounds.

''The aspect of going to plants for medicine is very much in vogue,''

said Diane Birt, director of the federally funded Center for Research

on Dietary Botanical Supplements at Iowa State University.

Phytomedics' competitors include biotech companies Phytofarm of the

United Kingdom, Efficas of Niwot, Col., and WellGen, another Rutgers

spinoff, according to Bertold Fridlender, Phytomedics president and

chief executive officer.

But he said few, if any, companies use exactly the same methods —

growing everything in water-based solutions inside greenhouses — or can

go from discovery of compounds through manufacturing.

''With our fully controlled system, we can elicit exactly what we want

and increase the concentration of the active ingredients by controlling

the nutrients and the way the plants are grown,'' Fridlender said. ''We

standardize our products from seed to pill.''

That's crucial because pharmaceutical companies must prove each dose of

a drug has exactly the same amount of active compound. Likewise,

product consistency would give any future Phytomedics dietary

supplements an edge in the $60 billion-a-year market for herbal

medicines.

That's because the level of active ingredient in such supplements now

can vary widely from bottle to bottle and brand to brand, so the

government bars specific claims of health benefits.

The supplement industry ''doesn't go through the care of standardizing

the products,'' said Dr. Shiff, a preventive medicine specialist

and associate professor at Wood Medical School in New

Brunswick. ''It's very doable if you do it carefully.''

Shiff said standardization would give Phytomedics ''a leg up on a lot

of other companies'' in the supplement field — and a marketing

advantage for the many people who believe natural medicines are safer

than chemically based ones. He said plant-made drugs might be safer and

have less side effects than existing ones.

Still, Schiff and Janice Reichert, senior research fellow at the Tufts

Center for the Study of Drug Development, said Phytomedics may have

trouble getting any drugs approved because the Food and Drug

Administration generally dislikes products that are compounds of

complex mixtures.

''It would be more difficult for the FDA to determine what is causing

the therapeutic effect,'' Reichert noted.

However, Dr. Braverman, a complementary medicine proponent in New

York, thinks Phytomedics will be able to get such complex drugs

approved, partly because plant-based drugs for gout, high blood

pressure and other illnesses have been on the market for years.

Phytomedics' two dozen scientists use multiple methods to pick their

plants. They grow and test compounds from plants long known to have

medicinal uses, and search computer databases with the molecular

structure of about 250,000 plant compounds to find ones structurally

similar to chemicals in existing medicines.

The company's focus so far is on developing prescription drugs, dietary

supplements or both to treat diabetes, obesity, inflammation and

autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Phytomedics now is in mid-stage human testing of a drug derived from

compounds in an old Chinese antirheumatic herb. Fridlender said the

drug, initially being developed for rheumatoid arthritis, blocks

inflammation differently than Celebrex and Vioxx, so it may not have

the cardiac risks associated with their class of drugs.

The company also is working on functional foods, or supplements added

to foods, that doctors might recommend to patients.

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