IBSAR and University of Helsinki Collaborate on Creating Medicinal Drugs

Members of IBSAR, UNDP, and DDTC meet to create medicinal drugs

IBSAR (AUB's Nature Conservation Center for Sustainable Futures), the UNDP Drylands Development Center, and the Drug Discovery Technology Center (DDTC) of the University of Helsinki in Finland held their third meeting in March as part of their joint research project to create new naturally derived medicinal drugs.

Delegates from the University of Helsinki met in Beirut with AUB faculty and members of IBSAR to draft a multinational proposal, which aims at chemically modifying specific plant products and generating computer models that would lead to an increased therapeutic potential of the products under investigation. At a later stage, the proposal will include testing the effects of the plant products on human cells.

Professor Arto Urtti, director of DDTC, and Dr. Heikki Vuorela of the Division of Pharmaceutical Biology at the University of Helsinki emphasized the importance of such research projects to world health, since over 60 percent of 1,184 registered drugs that have entered the market in the last 25 years are derived from nature.

Agreeing on the importance of the project, the UNDP Drylands Development Center strongly supports the collaboration between IBSAR and DDTC, both of whom have extensive experience within their field of expertise: IBSAR in the screening and identifying of natural therapeutics specifically in the field of cancer, and DDTC in drug development.

The project hopes to attract further collaboration with other scientists elsewhere that will lead to the advancement and appreciation of naturally derived therapeutics.