Hoodia Gordonii cactus, the new weight loss miracle?

Currently there is a major breakthrough on the weight loss front as South African researchers did research on the food eaten by the San people.

They discovered they did eat parts of the Hoodia cactus to suppress their appetite during hunting trips.

The UK company Phytopharm obtained the license for patented P57, the appetite-suppressing ingredient of the cactus and sold the rights to license the drug for $21m to Pfizer, the US pharmaceutical giant known for supplying e.g. Viagra.

After legal problems with the original inventors of the food (the San people) Phytopharm on paying the San people a commission on all sales so the market is now open for a drug version of the cactus. As you will understand this drug will cause quite a wave on the weightloss market the coming years.

Witdraai, South Africa - The slight, wizened man kneels in the sand and speaks of the long desert hunting treks of his youth, where his grandfather gave him the fleshy pulp of the hoodia cactus plant to stave off hunger and thirst. "The bushmen?? are always in the bush so we know a lot," said David Kruipeir, 67, a traditional healer for the nomadic African people known as the San. But the San have been wary of sharing their knowledge since their battle with the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a South African lab over plans to turn the hoodia into a new diet drug without acknowledging its discoverers. "The lid must stay on the pot," Kruipeir said.

The case is one of several to be discussed at the World Summit for Sustainable Development as examples of the difficulties indigenous people encounter when they try to cash in on medicines they have used for generations. The San, who number about 100,000, live in the region of the Kalahari Desert of southwest Africa where the hoodia, which they call Xhoba is native. For as long as they can remember, the bitter-tasting plant has kept them from feeling hungry on long journeys when they have little other food or water. The issue is part of a pattern of being exploited relating to their lands and their rights. It can't be looked upon in isolation. It is an indigenous people's human rights issue. The San case started when researchers at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, a South African lab partly funded by the government patented P57, the appetite suppressant derived from the hoodia, without acknowledging the San. The lab then licensed P57 to the small British pharmaceutical company Phytopharm which said the San clan that discovered the hoodia had died out, and subleased the patent to Pfzier. Eventually that San clan, which had been relocated by the apartheid government but was very much alive, found out about the patent. After legal wrangling an agreement on royalties was reached. Folk remedies have greatly contributed to modern medicine. By some accounts up to a quarter of present day drugs can be traced to plants --and many of those came from traditional medicine. The difficulty of translating traditional knowledge into Western medicine equitably has been a source of contention around the globe.

In India, the government working to create a national database of plants used traditionally for medicinal purposes is in a bid to head off any legal disputes. In South Africa, at the Collaborating Center for Drug Policy at the University of Cape town, researchers are working with traditional healers to develop anti-malaria drugs from local plants. Together, the researchers and healers have drafted a plan to split related profits equally with the communities. As for the San, although they remain annoyed that, in their view, they were almost swindled and they can't help but be amused by the prospect of Westerners using the hoodia plant to slim down.

A group of South African hunter-gatherers has reached a preliminary agreement with South Africa's leading research organisation to share any benefits arising from the commercialisation of an appetite-suppressing substance in the hoodia cactus. Both sides hope that the agreement will end a sharp dispute over the intellectual property rights of the hoodia's active ingredient, dubbed P57.

For thousands of years, the knowledge that a slice of hoodia cactus can stave off hunger and quench thirst has remained the sole preserve of the San, the hunter-gatherers who today still inhabit the desert regions of Southern Africa. The cactus is now seen as a potential goldmine, as it could be the first plant to give rise to a commercially viable appetite-suppressant drug. The United States alone, which has an estimated 35 to 65 million clinically obese people, offers an enormous market for such a drug.