BUILDING NEW PHARMACEUTICAL CAPABILITIES IN CENTRAL ASIA

The Central Asia ICBG program facilitates the development of the natural product-based pharmaceutical capabilities in Central Asia while encouraging biodiversity conservation and exploration, building research and economic capacity, developing ecologically-sustainable harvesting means and enhancing training and international cooperation. Central Asia possesses diverse and largely unexplored biodiversity spread over a wide range of climatic zones. The program integrates wide-ranging, state-of-the art, multiple-target screens performed by five separate groups with powerful structural and analytical approaches designed to characterize and develop therapeutic agents produced by plants, fungi and prokaryotes. Human diseases relevant to this region are being purposely targeted, involvement of the local scientists actively encouraged and the ethnobiological knowledge upheld. Care is being taken to assure equitable benefit sharing and biodiversity treaties compliance. A comprehensive training and bioinformatics initiative is strengthening the research and development component of the program and is increasing its impact on biodiversity preservation and inventory.