The government is being pressed to support the establishment of a BioChem Informatics Center (BIC) essential in drug discovery that will tap its rich biodiversity for an international pharmaceutical market similar to how India has thrived in this sector.

The BIC, which will use advanced information and software technology, is seen to accelerate the task of identifying a compound for a potential drug many times faster than conventional techniques.

“We plan to acquire (pharmaceutical and biotechnology software) Accelrys complete suite of computational programs for drug design and discovery. With these programs, one can easily screen potential drug candidates from a database of natural and synthetic products for any target biomolecule,” said Dr. Junie B. Billones, project leader of the proposed BIC.

BIC has immediate projects to develop second generation of candidate drugs against inflammation to substitute drugs in the market (like Medicol) that may have side effects such as ulcer.

“We came up with a score of new candidates predicted to be more potent than existing compounds in the market like celebrex and celecoxib,” said Billones in the proposed BIC paper filed with the Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research and Development (PCASTRD).

The presence of the country’s rich flora and fauna is prompting research authorities and also small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to press government to fund drug research laboratories and pilot facilities for potential drug manufacturing.

While the Philippines may not be able to immediately catch up with India in manufacturing drugs that are many times cheaper than those produced by globally-known multinational pharmaceutical companies, the country has so many advantage in this sector when it comes to natural resources that are potentially rich drug compound sources.

The Philippine government is actually now financing a P29 million program to map the Mt. Isarog which is believed to have many plant species that are rich potential sources for pharmaceutical products. But the project is very preliminary and is just establishing a database of natural resource in Mt. Isarog.

“We’re standardizing the system and putting the infrastructure in place. We can use this for drug discovery, but that’s not the priority. That may be third or fourth (phase),” said PCASTRD Executive Director Reynaldo V. Ebora in an interview.

This Mt. Isarog project should enable the Philippines to use its own natural resources or it may lose its own economic benefits from these.

“Other countries started out sending their plant species abroad to test a compound for a specific purpose such as for treating stomach ache. But they lost their claim on other active ingredients because there was no agreement on the use of other compounds in the plant,” said Dr. Marilou Nicolas, bioinformatics project leader for the Mt. Isarog project.

Nicolas noted that rosy periwinkle, a native plant in Madagascar’s tropical forests, has been found to contain vinblastine and vincristine compounds that are used to treat leukemia patients.

This was on top of the use of the rosy periwinkle for diabetes as traditionally practiced by Madagascar natives. However, the Madagascarians lost their economic benefit from rosy periwinkle when they asked western drug manufacturers to analyze the plant specie, and these drug companies found more than just diabetes treatment compounds in the plant.