Northern forests sprout bioprospecting leads.

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 other plants.

Part of the medical school's strategy is to find new and novel compounds from natural sources.

"It could be bacteria, dirt, leaves, bark, you name it, and then create libraries of compounds," says Ross.

A research team at the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, headed by researcher Mamdouh Abou-Zaid, already has compiled a library of between 500 and 600 plants and has isolated about 1,000 compounds so far. A single plant could host as many as 300 to 400 compounds. Some have anti-oxidant activity, which may be effective in helping to prevent cancer.

"There is no plant in Northern Ontario that I don't have an extract from," says Abou-Zaid, which includes some of the more rarer species. "I find a lot of (Northern) plants are untouched and unevaluated."

Abou-Zaid says there could potentially be 20,000 naturally-occurring compounds in many of the plants he has cataloged.

His published work has attracted the attention of pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer Inc., which is in negotiations with Natural Resources Canada to develop a partnership arrangement.

His work will complement the more targeted cell research being done on the medical school campuses in Sudbury and Thunder Bay.

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"A library like Mamdouh has developed is all about generating lead compounds and there's great value in that," says Ross.

One of the first steps in creating a bioprospecting centre would be to establish a High Throughput Screening (HTS) lab. It's a specialized biomolecular screening tool used to evaluate cell-based assays in the lengthy process of developing new medications.

The technology enables scientists to simultaneously test the biological effects of thousands of different compounds.

Hamilton's McMaster University established a high throughput screening laboratory as a project sponsored by the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (ORDCF).

ORDCF is an initiative designed to promote excellence in R & D within Ontario universities and other research institutes through public-private partnerships. McMaster's is a joint venture between the university, ORDCF and the private sector.

"We've already been successful in obtaining a small amount of funding for some preliminary equipment into a Sault lab to get things running," says Ross. "We're going to use that as proof of concept in the next phase with a full-blown application for a major initiative" that could be in the millions of dollars. "We're just pulling the budget together."

The project would require field biology equipment for collecting specimens, extraction facilities to take matter such as crude leaves and separate them into thousands of components, more chemistry and medical research equipment, and most importantly, the high throughput screening technology.

"The project management will be in Sault Ste. Marie, but the collection could be all over the place," says Ross. "It's a big multidimensional collaborative project that will involve the whole spectrum from researchers through to physicians."

Ross says a bioprospecting facility keeps research talent home, secures intellectual rights for new chemicals and extraction processes, and places those discoveries in the hands of the private sector to commercialize those products.

"With this proposal for bioprospecting, the concept is always going to be to take it further down the value chain in Northern Ontario to create maximum value for the opportunities we create."

Ross says there is great support from senior levels of government for such projects, but there will be no big dollars coming until their feasibility study is submitted for review.

"If you can couple medical research with economic development particularly in the forestry sector, that's a very positive proposal."

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business