FUNCTIONAL FOODWIRE, February 22, 2003: Unigen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a natural products research and development facility and proprietary ingredients supplier, has announced two important partnerships.
One is a collaborative plant collection agreement with BioResources International, Inc. (BRI), a science-driven, bioprospecting company engaged in research and commercial development of high-value natural products from tropical biodiversity.
BRI will source, collect and identify plants with ethnomedicinal use that are indigenous to Ghana, as well as provide Unigen with historical usage and taxonomic data specific to each plant.
Unigen will apply natural products chemistry and high throughput screening to fractionate the plant actives in order to discover novel and efficacious active ingredients for use in the nutritional supplement, functional food and beverage, and cosmeceutical industries, as well as drug leads for the pharmaceutical industry.
Both companies will collaborate on plant sourcing and cultivation, plant identification and recollection, plant extraction, and isolation of pure compounds. The bioactive plant fractions will then be further tested in Unigen’s laboratory via an assortment of biochemical, genomic and cell assays to determine the potential for positive reaction in a human system while targeting how the botanical compound responds chemically with each cell. Both companies agree to work side by side in the development and commercialization of botanical compounds from tropical forests.
Second, Botanical Liaisons LLC, an ethnobotanical consulting firm, and Unigen have reached an agreement to study traditional medicine and the discovery of new products in various countries including Belize, Cameroon, Peru, Tanzania and the United States.
Botanical Liaisons will identify, collect and supply medicinal plants with voucher specimens and traditional information to UPI for research and product development. In turn, UPI will screen putative plant actives for biological activities, isolate and purify the actives to homogeneity and develop drug leads and commercial products.