Gorilla food helps with arthritus

Washington Post:

A clear vial filled with amber fluid rests on scientist Ilya Raskin's desk, glinting in the autumn sunlight streaming through his office window. The container, a small glass bottle with a plain white screw-top, contains a substance Raskin calls 006. "Double-zero-six" is potentially more precious than the rarest topaz.

Raskin is a biochemist at Rutgers University's Biotechnology Center. The golden liquid on his desk may prove to be one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory substances ever discovered. "It contains a derivative of a plant known as grains of paradise, or Aframomum melegueta, a member of the ginger family," said Raskin. The compound works in a similar way to the well-known anti-inflammatory drugs Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra but, it is hoped, without their side effects, said Raskin and other scientists.

Aframomum is not easy to come by. It grows in just one place: the vine-choked swampy lowlands of West Africa's Grain Coast. Stretching from Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas in Liberia, this rain-drenched, humid land is named for its abundant grains of paradise.

Outside Africa, Aframomum is usually available only as a hard-to-find spice. For their experiments, Raskin and colleagues hire African botanists to inspect the seeds and ship them to the United States.

Raskin first became interested in Aframomum during an international effort to search for medicines from plants. "Aframomum contains compounds called gingerols, which are chemically similar to other anti-inflammatory compounds," he said. "That's what initially drew our attention to the plant, and was confirmed in the lab."

Plant-derived drugs are hardly new: aspirin, for example, is a synthetic version of a natural substance found in willow bark, and the heart medication digitalis is made from the foxglove plant.

Humans may not be the only creatures that use Aframomum to treat inflammation and infection, said primatologist Michael Huffman of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute in Japan. He said studies have shown that Western lowland gorillas in Africa prefer Aframomum shoots and seedpods to other foods.

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The spice can also prevent certain infections. Avon expects to be offering skin care products containing the spice in the spring or summer of 2007. It is not clear why the plant cannot be grown in the US.