Joanna Cosgrove11.18.10
The University of Missouri (MU) recently opened the doors to its new Botanical Research Center, which is charged with task of generating data about the health benefits of plants that are part of a flourishing and lucrative botanical supplements industry. Nicknamed the "Elderberry Center," this facility was created with a $7.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Many plants possess health benefits, but scientists have yet to pinpoint the precise properties that make some popular herbs and even common crops helpful or harmful. MU’s botanical center is one of only five in the country to receive NIH program designation status to lead interdisciplinary and collaborative research on botanical dietary supplements—an industry for which Nutrition Business Journal forecasts sales will increase about 19%.
“Despite their widespread use, the safety and efficacy of these products have not been adequately studied,” said Dennis Lubahn, PhD, principal investigator and director of the center, and a professor of Biochemistry and Child Health in the School of Medicine and the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at MU.
MU’s Center for Botanical Interaction Studies will focus on five different plants and their abilities to aid in the prevention of strokes and prostate cancer, as well as improve resistance to infectious diseases. Garlic, elderberries and soy are among the botanicals that will be studied.
The center consists of three projects and five cores. A team of more than 20 human, animal, plant, computer and chemistry scientists at MU will study how the botanicals use antioxidant properties to protect people from disease.
“The brain consumes 20% of circulating oxygen in our body and uses oxygen for many reactions,” commented Grace Sun, professor of Biochemistry, Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, and a project leader charged with leading a team of neuroscientists in the investigation of how botanicals may suppress stroke damage in the brain.
“Plants contain an array of chemicals that help our bodies cope with oxygen and oxidative stress,” said Kevin Fritsche, a project leader for the grant and professor of Animal Sciences, Nutritional Sciences and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in the MU School of Medicine and College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “Oxygen is essential for life, but when it’s handled inappropriately by the body’s cells, oxygen can have damaging toxic effects to body function and lead to disease.”
Multidisciplinary Approach
The University’s project leaders will make use the resources from the school’s Charles W. Gehrke Proteomics Center, MU Informatics Institute and the MU DNA Core Facility. MU researchers will also use the DNA core facility’s mega-sequencing technology to take a portion of the plant DNA, sequence and analyze it. The facility can simultaneously sequence 240 million pieces of DNA.
“MU’s Informatics Institute will then sort our data and allow us to see if the same functions are occurring in the brain, in the immune system and the prostate,” Dr. Lubahn said. “With the technology we have at MU, the potential for large impact, novel discoveries is tremendous.”
Because the potency of wild plants can vary, researchers at MU and elsewhere are cultivating their own for study purposes. MU is cultivating 600 types of soybean seeds to study different concentrations of the same compounds in the plants and how they might work to prevent prostate cancer. The school is also growing 60 types of elderberries to study the plant's possible role in boosting the immune system against infection and fighting cancer and inflammation in the body. Dr. Lubahn cited the potential variations in individual plants that could stand to make a difference in the botanical’s ability to fight disease.
Though Dr. Lubahn declined to offer his opinion to Nutraceuticals World on the supplement market, he said he was looking forward to seeing where MU’s initially-proposed research would lead them in terms of future research. “Right now we are looking forward to answering what we had proposed, but these things will change as we learn more,” he said.
The grant project and core leaders are faculty members in the MU School of Medicine; College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources; College of Engineering; College of Arts and Sciences; Bond Life Sciences Center; and College of Veterinary Medicine. They will partner with the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis to cultivate and procure plant materials for laboratory research.
The $7.6 million grant is the third and most recent federal award MU has received from the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In 2006, MU researchers received a $4.4 million grant to study the potential healing properties of African plants in partnership with the University of Western Cape in South Africa, the Missouri Botanical Garden and other partners. The first NIH Botanical Center award was received in 2000.