Promoting an Inclusive Approach to Benefit Sharing: Expanding the Scope of the CBD? - Benefit Sharing - page 163

Table 7.3 Examples of the increasingly inextricable utilization of plants, human genetic
resources and microb es in drug development
Use of human
genetic resources

Example Covered by

CBD? 5

Drug target A genetic study conducted by Swedish scientists using

samples from different ethnic groups in Africa
implicated C-reactive protein as a potential target for
an adjunct treatment for malaria. An unrelated study by
Japanese scientists has suggested that the compound
AHCC isolated from shiitake mushrooms native to East
Asia lowers levels of C-reactive protein

Partially
(para. 13.7)

Vaccine target A large number of studies use samples from individuals living

in Africa and other malaria endemic regions to identify
potential candidate antigens for malaria. A novel way
of administering malaria vaccine antigens through the
consumption of transgenic tomatoes was suggested

Partially
(para. 43.3)

Antibodies During the avian influenza pandemic, samples taken from

Vietnamese survivors by scientists in the US were
used to identify antibodies that could be used to design
antibody-based therapies for the treatment of H5N1
infections. Technologies for creating recombinant
antibodies are becoming increasingly sophisticated,
and using these kinds of samples to guide the develop-
ment of antibody-based therapeutics is likely to have
increasing importance. Such antibodies would often be
produced through the use of microbial cells. These anti-
bodies can also be used to guide the selection of avian
influenza virus antigens for use in vaccines

Partially
(para. 13.2)

Chimeric
proteins

A strategy seen with increasing frequency in anti-cancer
drug development is the creation of chimeric proteins
that combine a human protein with a plant toxin into a
single molecule that selectively kills cancer cells; the
expression of these protein constructs thus involves both
human genetic material and plant genetic material

Partially
(para. 43.3)

Gene therapy A major strategy for gene therapy is to insert a human

gene into a virus, which will then deliver the gene to
human cells; these virus constructs thus contain both
human genetic material and viral genetic material

Unclear
(para. 13.2)

Diagnostics Genetic diagnostics are becoming an increasingly important

area, as can be seen in the example of Herceptin and
HER2/neu. Creation of genetic diagnostics relies on the
identification of important polymorphisms, and there are a
large number of studies in many different ethnic popula-
tions all over the world to identify these polymorphisms for
use in potential diagnostics. A study by a group in France
compared alleles that predispose to rheumatoid arthritis
across ten different ethnic populations from 17 countries

Unlikely
(para. 13.2)

Sources Israelsson et al. ( 2009 ), Yanagimoto et al. ( 2008 ), Perlaza et al. ( 2001 ), Chowdhury and
Bagasra ( 2007 ), Khurana et al. ( 2009 ), Ben-Yehudah and Lorberboum-Galski ( 2004 ), Barnetche
et al. ( 2008 ), http://www.fusionantibodies.com//index.cfm

5 References in this column are to the annex to the CBD ( 2009 ), which begins on page 6 of that