San reach agreement with CSIR over Hoodia

PRICKLY DISPUTE FINALLY LAID TO REST: SAN REACH AGREEMENT WITH CSIR OVER USE OF APPETITE-SUPPRESSING CACTUS

by Tamar Kahn

Business Day (Johannesburg) Opinion March 22, 2002

For thousands of years the San have used the Hoodia cactus as an appetite suppressant and thirst quencher. It helped them endure long hunts, and resist the temptation to eat their kill before they returned to their camps.

The cactus is potentially worth a fortune, because it could very well be the first plant to give rise to a commercially viable appetite suppressant drug.

In the US alone, with an estimated 35-million to 65-million clinically obese people, the market for such a product is huge and growing all the time.

The central issue in the tale of the cactus, the San, and the international drug companies, is what benefits will the San derive from all of this?

That question made international headlines last year, when a British journalist revealed that the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had patented Hoodia's appetite-suppressing ingredient, dubbed P57, and granted the development rights to Phytopharm, a small pharmaceutical firm in the UK.

Phytopharm's scientists announced that P57 would have none of the side effects that plague most slimming products, because it was derived from a natural product.

Soon afterwards, it sold the licensing rights for the drug to Pfizer, the US company that made its name as the manufacturer of the impotence drug Viagra,for $21m.

Meanwhile in SA [South Africa], the mood between the San and the CSIR was far from pretty, with the San threatening to take legal action to ensure they derived some benefit from the potentially lucrative patent for P57.

However, in past months, the relationship between the CSIR and the San council has shifted dramatically. On Tuesday, the two organisations released a joint statement in which they announced that they had reached a "memorandum of understanding".

According to the memorandum, the CSIR recognised the San as the custodiansof traditional knowledge associated with the uses of a large variety of plant materials, including the Hoodia plant. The San, in turn, acknowledge that it was necessary for the CSIR to protect the work that had been done in isolating the active ingredient in the plant by patenting it in the CSIR's name.

Roger Chennells, the lawyer representing the San council, described the memorandum as a significant step towards reaching a "benefit-sharing" agreement between the San council and the CSIR, which they hoped to have in place by September.

Petrus Vaalbooi, chairman of the San council, said: "We see this as an opportunity to engage with a partner in a way that will achieve benefits that will permeate to the very poorest people within our communities."

But critics point out that details of the CSIR's agreement with the drug companies is confidential, and no one knows how much of the royalties it receives will filter through to the San.

Petro Terblanche, the director of the CSIR division that deals with bioprospecting, will not specify what the San are likely to gain, saying it is still too early to define a benefit sharing model.

"We have agreed on a foundation for negotiation that recognises the contributions made by both sides: indigenous knowledge from the San and technical expertise from the CSIR."

She says nothing is being excluded from the negotiation table: royalties, knowledge exchange, job creation from cultivating and conserving the Hoodia cactus, and bursaries are all under discussion.

It is difficult, she says, to lay down a firm agreement without knowing what the end result of the investment in P57 will be.

Rob Adam, director general in the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, says the memorandum of understanding reached by the San council and the CSIR is no small feat.

"It's extremely difficult to attribute intellectual property to groups of people, as opposed to individuals. They appear to have resolved this in spite of the absence of legislation governing indigenous knowledge," he says.

That legislative vacuum will end later this year, when the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Bill is tabled in Parliament.

Adam believes the CSIR has done a good job in another way, because it succeeded in keeping the intellectual property rights to the Hoodia's active ingredients here in SA, selling only the development rights to the drug companies.

Chennells says that one of the important things learnt by the San community he represents in the wrangling over P57 is that they are the repository for valuable knowledge that can be exploited in partnership with technologically skilled agencies such as the CSIR.

The amicable mood bodes well for the CSIR, which has its eyes firmly fixed on the commercial potential of SA's immensely diverse biological resources.

Indigenous knowledge held by communities such as the San offers the CSIR and its research partners one of the most effective ways to quickly sift through the surfeit of genetic material and identify viable projects.

The CSIR recently launched a major bioprospecting project, that brings together various parastatal research institutions and universities, including the Medical Research Council, the National Botanical Institute, the Agricultural Research Council, and the universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, and the North, in a bid to exploit SA's biodiversity.

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