MACA: Libido-Enhancing Root

Libido-Enhancing Root Central in Global Dispute Over Bioprospecting
January 5, 2007 13:41
By RICK VECCHIO

JUNIN, Peru -- In a small storefront on a bleak, wind-swept Andean
plateau, Timotea Cordova offers an oxygen-deprived visitor a
traditional elixir to ward off the breathless effect of the high
altitude.

Dropping a few shriveled tuber roots into a blender, the 80-year-old,
Quechua Indian shopkeeper promises with a playful glance that the
concoction will also provide a leg up later in the bedroom.

For hundreds of years, Quechua Indians have grown maca, the
frost-resistant root that thrives in these frigid Andean highlands, to
boost stamina and sex drive. The root, they believe, is nature's bounty
and belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

Maca growers and indigenous organizations were outraged when, in 2001,
a New Jersey-based company, PureWorld Botanicals, received a U.S.
patent for exclusive commercial distribution of an extract of maca's
active libido-enhancing compounds that it branded as MacaPure.

Peruvian officials called the patent an "emblematic case" of biopiracy
and are preparing to challenge it in U.S. courts.

The maca dispute is just the latest collision between indigenous people
and commercial interests over so-called biological prospecting, the
growing practice of scouring the globe for exotic plants, microbes and
other living things ripe for commercial exploitation.

Bioprospecting has huge potential for good, say researchers who go to
sea, climb mountains and trek to obscure corners of the world in search
of exotic and undiscovered life.

A 2005 U.N. University report concluded that 62 percent of all cancer
drugs were created from bioprospecting discoveries.

The venom of a deadly sea snail found off the coast of the Philippines
led Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop the painkiller Prialt, which
U.S. regulators approved in 2004. The key ingredient in the breast
cancer drug Taxol owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is taken from the
bark of the yew tree, and Wyeth's kidney transplant drug Rapamune comes
from Easter Island soil.

But bioprospecting is mostly unregulated and there are mounting calls
to establish legal frameworks for such work.

The Convention on Biological Diversity produced at the 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro entitled nations to a share of the profits
from substances yielded by their flora and fauna. It was ratified by
188 countries _ but not the United States, which argues that such a
requirement stifles innovation and would undermine the patent system.

That hasn't stopped some of the world's poorest countries, which also
hold the richest pockets of natural biodiversity, from fighting to
apply the convention to international patent law.

India has had the most success, most recently persuading the European
Patent Board of Appeals to invalidate a 1994 patent granted to
U.S.-based W.R. Grace & Co. for an insecticide derived from neem seeds.

Peru and Brazil, both at the forefront of the biopiracy debate, have
been less persuasive.

Brazil, which has some of the world's strictest regulations to prevent
the removal of genetic materials from the Amazon, has been hard-pressed
to demonstrate a single case of biopiracy before the World Trade
Organization.

Attempts by Peruvian indigenous groups, meanwhile, ultimately failed to
overturn U.S. patents based on ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant used
for centuries in religious and healing ceremonies, and nuna, a
nutritious Andean bean that pops when toasted.

Peru hopes the MacaPure dispute will become a pivotal case in attempts
to require all patent applications to disclose the source of genetic
materials.

Alejandro Argumedo, a Quechua Indian agronomist and activist, says the
French company that bought PureWorld in 2005, Naturex, has no right to
"privatize knowledge that belongs to an entire region."

Naturex's marketing manager, Antoine Dauby, says the company
acknowledges that maca's beneficial properties were long ago discovered
by indigenous Peruvians. He says its patent lets them "grow, sell and
use maca as they have for centuries."

"Our patent is for the extraction and isolation of maca's key
ingredient _ and nothing else," said Dauby. As a good faith gesture, he
said, Naturex is offering to grant free licenses to Peruvian companies
to use MacaPure in their products.

Qun Yi Zheng, PureWorld's former president and chief scientist, says
the company invested more than $1 million and three years of research
in the endeavor and that it popularized maca as a worldwide Peruvian
export.

Peruvians "should not be so narrow-minded," Zheng said, but should
instead be grateful. "After we studied it, put money into the research,
(maca) has become a useful commodity."

A wide range of potency peddling maca-based products _ from powders and
pills to jams and candies _ have helped triple Peru's exports of the
plant from $1.3 million in 2000 to more than $3 million annually since
2003, according to the Exporters Association of Peru.

Japan was Peru's biggest maca customer in 2005, followed by the United
States, Germany, Belgium and Canada.

Zheng's peer-reviewed study, published in the
journal
Urology in April 2000, showed that MacaPure greatly
improved penile dysfunction in castrated rats. Also,
lab
mice fed the stuff for 22 days engaged in sexual
intercourse up to 67 times in a three-hour period,
compared with 16 times by less randy rodents
deprived of the extract.

Peru contends PureWorld's alcohol-based extraction process simply
mimics the centuries-old practice by Andean people of soaking dried
maca root in Andean moonshine to release the libido boosters.

But providing scientific proof to show PureWorld's formula falls short
of a "novel" and "useful" invention has proven elusive.

"We don't have the technology for this analysis and we have had to turn
to a scientist in the United States who offered to do the analysis for
free," said Manuel Ruiz, a director at the nonprofit Peruvian Society
for Environmental Law and a member of Peru's National Anti-Biopiracy
Commission.

Peru has also enlisted the pro bono help of Washington attorney Jorge
Goldstein to prepare a legal challenge. He is examining, among other
things, archives from rural Peruvian universities to demonstrate that
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office failed to consider "prior art" _
pre-existing knowledge that could be used to overturn the patent.

Chris Kilham, who conducted the initial field research for MacaPure in
the Peruvian highlands, says he can see the issue from both sides.

"PureWorld, which did all of this work, found compounds that nobody
knew existed before," said Kilham, a professor of ethnobotany at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"On the other hand, the native people from whom the knowledge of
especially the sexual applications of maca arise were not at all
considered in these patents."

The specter of biopiracy in Peru dates back to the 1630s, when Jesuit
priests took bark from the Peruvian cinchona tree _ the original source
of quinine _ back to Europe, where it was hailed as a miracle cure for
malaria.

Peru never got wealthy from the discovery.

Cinchona seeds were smuggled by the Dutch from Peru in the 19th century
and planted in Java. Indonesia became the world's primary source of
quinine.

The image of the cinchona tree was put on the Peruvian flag _ a
constant reminder of Peru's unrewarded contribution to one of the most
important breakthroughs in medical history.

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