San, CSIR agree on obesity drug made from Hoodia Gordonii Cactus

The San people and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have finally come to a royalty agreement for a potentially lucrative new obesity drug, reports Business Day.

The drug, known as P57, was developed from a Kalahari cactus known as hoodia, or xhoba by the San. Xhoba played an important role in San traditional healing.

Details of the agreement have not yet been released. However a CSIR spokesperson told Business Day that profits would be shared equally between all San.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the CSIR patented the drug in 1997, and subsequently licensed it to British drug company Phytopharm. Phytopharm has now sold the rights to United States-based Pfizer.

The deal came under fire, however, when it was revealed that the San people had been left out of any royalty agreements.

Phytopharm estimates that the market for obesity treatments is in excess of $3-billion in the US alone.

Hunger-killing cactus "could grow in Australia"

A RARE and ugly cactus that grows in the African Kalahari desert is being touted as the latest weapon in the battle of the bulge and potentially the world's first organic weight-loss drug.

Hoodia, traditionally used by the Kalahari's San bushmen to ward off hunger and thirst during long hunting trips, reputedly kills the appetite for 24 hours.

The hunger-quelling ingredient, known as P57, was discovered a few years ago and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer now holds the developing and marketing rights to turn the molecule into weight-loss gold.

It is reportedly being cultivated in industrial quantities at a secret location under armed guard by South African authorities.

But the makers of a BBC documentary to be aired on the ABC's Four Corners tomorrow night believe the conditions are right for the plant - which thrives in hot desert environments - to grow wild in parts of Australia.

"The Hoodia thrives only in deserts at a temperature of 50 degrees and over," said Tom Mangold of the BBC's Correspondent program.pe"Australia has such an environment. It's just possible the plant grows wild here too."

According to Dr Rich Dixey, the head of UK company Phytopharm which discovered P57, the molecule works by acting on the nerve cells in the brain that sense glucose sugar.

"What Hoodia seems to contain is a molecule that's about ten thousand times as active as glucose," he told Mr Mangold.

"It goes to the mid-brain and actually makes those nerve cells fire as if you were full. But you haven't eaten food, nor do you want to."

Animal and clinical trials have backed the findings, with a group of morbidly obese people reducing their calorie intake by about 1,000 calories a day - roughly 50 per cent.

As if that isn't good enough news, Hoodia is also said to have euphoric and aphrodisiac effects, according to Mr Mangold, who sampled the plant himself.

On the downside, the plant is said to have an unpleasant taste.

However, the Hoodia story has been marred by allegations of bio-piracy and concerns about what the Western discovery will mean to the San tribespeople, who could be turned into millionaires overnight.

Pfizer and lawyers representing the Kalihari Bushmen are waiting for clinical trials to end in about three or four years.