Sustainable international drug discovery using natural products

Dr Cordell returned to talk about ways to produce drugs sustainably. There are thousands of compounds in each organism on the planet. Many of these may prove useful medicinally. There are challenges in balancing technology and nature for sourcing drugs. Paraphrasing from Alice in Wonderland, the way to go depends on where you want to go to. Some further challenges noted were.

Renewal resource identification
Defossilization requirements
Global healthcare gap
Natural vs production

It is too expensive to scale traditional medicine while synthetic medicine has volume, distribution, and cost problems. Current approval of a drug takes 15-20 years and $2.7 billion.

Impact of Climate Change on Human Health

This chart shows that climate change has more effects than many people realize. Untreatable diseases like dengue are spreading to new areas of the world. Cutting back on fossil fuels also reduces the components used for synthetic medicines. Fossil fuels will not last in any case and renewables will need to be developed.

What will be the origin of medicinal agents in the future? Nature should be thought of as a reservoir of useful compounds. We must be able to produce agents that can be utilized to create a circular biological economy. This would allow us to turn biowaste into biomaterials.