Phytopharm Breaks New Ground With Botanicals

Phytopharm of the UK is on the verge of capitalizing on a whole new areaof the pharmaceutical industry. The company is unique in its approach to the development of prescription medicines formulated from traditional plant-based treatments.

While many pharmaceuticals are derived from plants, in the 20th century the predominant approach to drug development has been to isolate single chemicals, with at least one identified mechanism of action, and then to produce them synthetically or by recombinant DNA techniques. This approach rests squarely on the assumption that it is always necessary to identify an active compound prior to the commencement of clinical trials.

Many of the large-scale screening efforts put in place by the pharmaceutical industry reinforce this assumption, by identifying a desired mechanism, creating an assay, and running hundreds or thousands of individual chemicals against it, until a suitable candidate or candidates for further development is/are encountered.