Loss of Species Is Hurting Quest for New Medicines

Gillian Wong in Singapore
Associated Press

April 23, 2008

The world risks losing new medical treatments for osteoporosis, cancer, and other human ailments if it does not act quickly to conserve the planet's endangered and at-risk creatures, a senior United Nations environmental official said today.

Earth's organisms offer a variety of naturally made chemical compounds with which scientists could develop new medicines, but many potentially interesting species are under threat of extinction, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP).

"We must do something about what is happening to biodiversity," Steiner told reporters. "We must help society understand how much we already depend on diversity of life to run our economies, our lives, but more importantly, what are we losing in terms of future potential."

Steiner was announcing the conclusions of a new medical book, Sustaining Life, on the sidelines of a UNEP-organized conference in Singapore. The book is the work of more than a hundred experts, with the key authors based at Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment.

The book underscores what may be lost to human health when species go extinct, Steiner said.

"Because of science and technology ... we are in a much better position to unlock this ingenuity of nature found in so many species," he said. "Yet, in many cases, we will find that we have already lost it before we were able to use it."

One example are the southern gastric brooding frogs, or Rheobactrachus, which raise their young in the female's stomach. The animals were discovered in Australian rainforests in the 1980s.

In other animals, the young would have been digested by enzymes and acids in the stomach. But preliminary studies showed that the baby frogs produced a substance or a range of substances that inhibited acid and enzyme secretions and prevented the mother from emptying her stomach into her intestines while the young were developing.

Research on this species of frog could have led to new insights into preventing and treating human peptic ulcers, but such studies could not be continued because the two species of Rheobactrachus went extinct, according to the book. (Related: "Australian Frog—First Vertebrate to Make Poison" [May 17, 2002].)

Steiner said the book looks at seven groups of threatened organisms for potential or known medical value: amphibians; bears; cone snails; sharks; non-human primates; horseshoe crabs; and gymnosperms, a type of plant life. (Related: "Wonder Drug" Snails Face Threats, Experts Warn" [October 16, 2003].)

Last year more than 16,000 species were labeled as threatened with extinction on the Swiss-based International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species. (See photos of some of the endangered animals.)