Medicine Hunters

The search for more and better plant-based medicines continues today.

It’s more than a matter of finding new plants or documenting traditional remedies before they disappear, although that is part of the process.

Researchers are also trying to understand more about the medicinal plants we already use - to identify how each chemical compound affects the human body. Full-scale clinical trials of traditional remedies are just beginning, a process that will give doctors a more complete picture of what a particular herbal remedy can (and can’t) do for a patient. Botanists and growers are also part of this process, as they work on ways to produce plants with a higher or more consistent level of medicinal chemicals.

At one time, thousands of years ago, the people who were harvesting medicinal plants knew what they were doing. They knew this plant is good, this one is not. They had a traditional knowledge that has since been lost. Today, many medicinal plants have become crops, where everything is harvested, whether good or not. So the idea behind standardization is to make sure every plant is the same.

This is important because scientific people now think that there is a synergy among all the different chemical compounds in a medicinal plant. It's not just the one on the label that's important - it's really the whole plant that's important. If you have standardized plants, you can be sure that every plant has the same amount of every single chemical compound within the plant - and there can be hundreds of them.

The plants from the University of Guelph are acclimatized and grown in a controlled environment facility. It looks like a greenhouse, but it's way more than that - every aspect of the environment is controlled. We run thousands of experiments on different lines with different types of environments to make sure we get the best plants - that is, ones that are identical and have the right chemical compound contents and the same potency. Growing in a controlled environment ensures that none of the plants is contaminated by polluted soil, which is sometimes a problem when they're grown outdoors in fields.

It's a combination of all the factors in the environment - the light, the temperature, the CO2 in the air, what you feed them, the type of media they're in, whether it's peat moss or other kind of soil-less media or no media at all. It's really a lot of different things. So it's not that easy, unfortunately. If you stress a plant, the plant will try to reproduce and produce more of those chemical compounds. It's their way of defending themselves against predators in the wild. But that doesn't mean we always want to stress them, because we want to have the right proportions of the right chemicals. Getting more of a certain chemical doesn't necessarily make the plant more medicinally effective.

Some medicinal plants are on the endangered species list, and some have disappeared already. It's a concern, of course. Echinacea doesn't seem to be endangered, but often the wrong plants are harvested because people don't know what they're doing. But yes, what we're doing can protect endangered species and, hopefully, in the future, once we go to work on other plants that may be on the CITES [Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] list, then greenhouse growing ought to have a beneficial aspect.