Novel targets . Earlier, I described to you the targets that are classical such as: cell wall, protein synthesis, ribosomes, some of the DNA targets. There are targets presumably out there that we don't know about. Essential targets; genes required for the organism to survive. But our classical methods don't give us an opportunity to identify them. There's a big piece of research going on in that area.
Examine materials from a variety of sources . A good plan: things from the sea, you name it, terrestrial, marine, animals, insects, broad chemical files. One such area is the material used in traditional Chinese medicine. Some of you probably are familiar with traditional Chinese medicine. Now, we were doing some studies with plants because that's one of the foundations of that approach (traditional Chinese medicine) in therapy. But we didn't look to the Chinese culture very well. Once we talked with some of the people from the culture, we find out we're taking a poor approach evaluating plants as a source of new antibacterials. We were taking various parts of a plant, chopping them up, extracting them, and look for activity in the extracts. That's the traditional pharmaceutical approach. Wait a minute, when you talk to some of the people, how to you apply this? The response - Oh, we only deliver it orally. We don't do any injection. Oh, by the way in some of these, the physician actually chews the plant and takes the spittle and puts it on the wound/infection site. Oh, that's something different. There could be transformations going on, metabolism going on and releasing active drugs. So when we get involved particularly with other cultures, we have to pay strict attention when we're trying to follow up on their activities. I'm not saying that those traditional medicines don't have activity. I just don't know. We don't know how to identify the activity.
|
|
|
Narrative Index
BioForum Index
