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HerbalEGram: Volume 6, Number 8, August 2009
ASP Holds 50th Anniversary Meeting in Hawaii
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Over 675 people attended the American Society of Pharmacognosy’s (ASP) 50th annual meeting and scientific conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, held June 27 through July 1.
The meeting celebrated the history of ASP, as well as its growth and its scientific focus on drug discovery from a variety of natural sources, including medicinal plants, fungi, marine organisms, and animals.
The host and organizer for the conference was Roy Okuda, PhD, professor of chemistry at San Jose State University. The scientific program was organized by John Cardellina II, PhD, a consulting natural products chemist, formerly with the National Cancer Institute, former president of ASP, and formerly vice-president of botanical science at the Council for Responsible Nutrition.
The highlight of the opening evening was a series of short talks by various ASP members, who reviewed ASP meetings and achievements in each decade since the organization’s founding in 1959. The first talk was given by Prof. Norman R. Farnsworth, PhD, research professor of pharmacognosy and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the 15 living founders of ASP.
Douglas Kinghorn, PhD, the Jack L. Beal professor and chair of the division of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at Ohio State University, gave a brief history of ASP’s journal, Journal of Natural Products (JNP). This journal was originally called Lloydia, having initially been the journal of the Lloyd Library in Cincinnati, which ASP took over in 1961. Since 1996, JNP has been co-published by ASP and the American Chemical Society. Dr. Kinghorn currently serves as editor of JNP.
The various sessions were organized by subject, such as Research on Microorganisms, Pharmacologically Active Natural Products, Bioactive Constituents of Plants, Pharmacological Screens and Natural Products, etc.
As has become customary at ASP meetings over the past few decades, an increasing focus of the presentations centered on chemical analysis of medicinal plants, fungi, and marine organisms; discovery of novel compounds in these various materials; the elucidation of the structures of these new compounds; and the determination of biological activities via various experimental and/or animal models. Most presentations were highly scientific and technical, with few being focused on classical pharmacognosy. There was very little about ethnobotany or herbal medicine per se, except as these traditional practices utilize plants that merit further chemical, pharmacological, and/or toxicological research as possible drug discovery leads. This highly technical conference contained a plethora of detailed medicinal plant information that may stretch the normal comfort zone of many ethnobotanists and herbalists.
The usual highlights of the ASP conferences are the presentations by recipients of various awards given by ASP to scientists who have conducted significant work in the pharmacognosy and natural products research arenas. The highest honors, among several other awards that ASP bestows each year, are the Norman R. Farnsworth Award and the Varro E. Tyler Prize, named, respectively, for two of the most well-known leaders in the American medicinal plant research community (as well as founding members of ASP in 1959): Dr. Farnsworth and the late Varro E. Tyler, PhD, DSc, former dean of the College of Pharmacy and Pharmacal Sciences and executive vice-president for academic affairs at Purdue University.
The recipient of the Norman R. Farnsworth Research Achievement Award in 2009 is Kuo-Hsiung Lee, Kenan professor of medicinal chemistry and director of the Natural Products Research Laboratories at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Lee’s extensive lecture covered his many vast accomplishments in the field of medicinal chemistry, including his work on the following medicinal plants: dang shen (Salvia miltiorrhiza), Tylophora indica, mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), sweet Annie (Artemisia annua), and others.
The Varro Tyler Prize for Research in Botanicals was awarded to Adolf Narstedt, PhD. Prof. Narstedt is no stranger to medicinal plant researchers and students. He is a retired professor from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology and Phytochemistry, Westfalia Wilhelms-University in Muenster, Germany, and for 11 years he was the editor of Planta Medica, one of the world’s leading medicinal plant journals (and the official journal of the European Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Products Research). Prof. Narstedt was respectfully and somewhat humorously introduced with a retrospective of his life by his former student, Veronika Butterweck, PhD, associate professor at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Dr. Narstedt spoke on one of his favorite subjects, St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum). Of particular interest was his emphasis on the presence of various compounds that work as “co-effectors,” i.e., proanthocyanidins and other phenolic substances (flavonoids), which help to increase the solubilization and transport of hypericin.
The Matt Suffness Award, given annually to a young researcher, honors the life and achievements of the late Matt Suffness, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute who strongly supported natural product research as a source of potential new drugs for treating and/or preventing various types of cancers. This year’s recipient of the Suffness award is Shengmin Sang, PhD, of the Human Nutrition Research Program at the Chambers Biomedical/Biotechnology Research Institute at North Carolina Central University. Dr. Sang spoke on a subject of considerable interest to cancer researchers, public health officials, consumers, and others: “Stability and Bioavailability Issues in Understanding the Cancer Preventive Effects of Tea Polyphenols.”
Other presentations of particular interest to this writer include the following:
Cindy Angerhofer, PhD, of Aveda made a presentation on “Natural Compounds and Botanicals in the Development of Functional Cosmetic Products.” Geoffery A. Cordell, PhD, retired professor of pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and now a natural products research consultant, gave an interesting lecture on “Sustainable Drugs” and the need for more awareness among members of the medicinal plant research community of the significant challenges related to future supply of medicinal plant materials. Rudolf Bauer, PhD, of the Department of Pharmacognosy, Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria made a presentation on “Activity of Cinnamon Bark on Expression of NFkB1 Protein.” Joe Betz, PhD, of the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, spoke on “The NIH/ODS Analytical Methods and Referee Materials Program for Botanical Dietary Supplements: Five-Year Accomplishments and Future Directions.”
Of course, there were many other presentations, too numerous to mention here, including over 500 poster presentations throughout the 5-day conference. As noted above, many of the themes now being discussed at the ASP meetings go beyond the traditional, classical pharmacognostic subjects dealing with medicinal plants. However, although many of the oral presentations at this conference were based on marine organisms and fungi, of the more than 500 posters, most had plant themes, particularly the chemistry and pharmacology of common and not-so-common medicinal plants. Further, more than 50% of manuscripts published in the JNP are based on plants.
Next year’s ASP meeting will be held in St. Petersburg, Florida and the 2011 meeting will be in San Diego. More information on ASP is available at www.phcog.org, and more information on the history of ASP is available in an article from HerbalGram 82.1
—Mark Blumenthal
Reference
1. Stafford L. American Society of Pharmacognosy Celebrates 50th Anniversary.
HerbalGram. 2009;82:16. Available at: http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue82/article3406.html. |
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