Sustainable drugs and global health care

The global population has now reached 7 billion, and forests and other resources around the world are being irreversibly depleted for energy, food, shelter, material goods, and drugs to accommodate population needs. For the developed world, efforts have been initiated to make drug production „greener“, with milder synthetic reagents, shorter reaction times, and more efficient processing, thereby using less energy, becoming more atom efficient, and generating fewer by-products. However, for most of the world's population, plants, based on many well-established systems of medicine, in either crude or extract form, represent the foundation of primary health care for the foreseeable future. Contemporary harvesting methods for medicinal plants are severely depleting these critical indigenous resources. However, maintaining and enhancing the availability of quality medicinal agents on a sustainable basis is an unappreciated public health care concept.

To accomplish these goals for future health care, and restore the health of the Earth, a profound paradigm shift is necessary: all medicinal agents should be regarded as a sustainable commodity, irrespective of their source. Several approaches to enhancing the availability of safe and efficacious plant-based medicinal agents will be presented including integrated strategies to manifest the four pillars (information, botany, chemistry, and biology) for medicinal plant quality control. These integrated initiatives involve information systems, metabolomics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, in-field analysis of medicinal plants, and the application of new detection techniques for the development of medicinal plants with enhanced levels of safe and reproducible biological agents.