Rainforest Produces AIDS Fighter

The families of two Samoan women who passed on knowledge of a tree's healing powers will share in profits from any AIDS drug developed from the rainforest plant.

In an agreement announced Wednesday, the nonprofit ReSearch Alliance promised to give the government of Samoa and the healers 20 percent of any commercial revenue it gets from an experimental anti-HIV compound called prostratin.

Scientists hope to begin the first clinical trials on humans within a year.

The drug, if successful, could earn millions of dollars a year for the Samoans, said Irl Barefield, executive director of ReSearch Alliance, which is licensed to research the drug by the National Cancer Institute.

The federal National Institutes of Health would get 5 percent of any profits. All other profits would go toward AIDS research, he said.

"It could be Samoa's gift to the world," said Dr. Paul Cox, who first brought the herbal compound out of a small Samoan village nearly a decade ago and was rebuffed by pharmaceutical companies that he tried to interest in researching it.

Cox now heads the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii and Florida, set up by Congress to conserve tropical plant diversity.

"These healers were heirs to thousands of years of knowledge," Cox said by phone from an AIDS forum in Los Angeles. "They were bright people. Talking to them about the plants was like talking to another Ph.D."

The medicine women used the mamala tree to treat hepatitis. The plant's bark and wood contain prostratin, an experimental phorbol ester that inhibits HIV infection, according to an abstract in Blood, the journal of the American Hematology Society.

The drug works by triggering dormant HIV cells, which can lie undetected for decades, to spring back where they can be attacked by other anti-AIDS drugs, Barefield said. Besides exposing the HIV for destruction, he said, the drug seems to prevent the AIDS virus from entering healthy cells.

The tree's scientific name is Homalanthus nutans.

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