Building New Pharmaceutical Capabilities in Central Asia

描述(申请人提供)：中亚ICBG项目将促进乌兹别克斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦以天然产品为基础的制药能力的发展，同时鼓励生物多样性保护和勘探，建设研究和经济能力，开发生态可持续的收获方法，并加强培训和国际合作。乌兹别克斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦在广泛的气候带上拥有多样的、基本上未被开发的生物多样性。该计划将整合由五个不同小组进行的广泛、最先进的多目标筛选，以及强大的结构和分析方法，旨在表征和开发由中亚植物、真菌和原核生物生产的治疗剂。该计划将建立在参与国科学家与罗格斯大学之间发展良好的长期合作基础上，该合作得到了全面的法律协议的支持。与该地区有关的人类疾病将被有目的地瞄准，积极鼓励当地科学家的参与，并坚持民族生物学知识。将注意确保公平分享惠益和遵守生物多样性条约。与拟议的ICBG计划相关的筛查将包括10个主要治疗领域和近60个与疾病相关的特定人类靶点和病原微生物。该计划将为这些筛选的第一阶段产生108,000个原核生物、10,260个植物和6,000个真菌样本。通过罗格斯大学和伊利诺伊大学的主要匹配资金，一项全面的培训和生物信息学倡议成为可能，该倡议将加强该计划的研发部分，并进一步增加其对生物多样性保护和清单的影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Central Asia ICBG program will facilitate the development of the natural product-based pharmaceutical capabilities in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan while encouraging biodiversity conservation and exploration, building research and economic capacity, developing ecologically-sustainable harvesting means and enhancing training and international cooperation. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan possess diverse and largely unexplored biodiversity spread over a wide range of climatic zones. The program will integrate wide-ranging, state-of-the art, multiple-target screens performed by five separate groups with powerful structural and analytical approaches designed to characterize and develop therapeutic agents produced by plants, fungi and prokaryotes from Central Asia. The program will build upon a well-developed, longstanding cooperation between the scientists in the participating countries and Rutgers University, which is supported by comprehensive legal agreements. Human diseases relevant to this region will be purposely targeted, involvement of the local scientists actively encouraged and the ethnobiological knowledge upheld. Care will be taken to assure equitable benefit sharing and biodiversity treaties compliance. The screens associated with the proposed ICBG program will encompass 10 major therapeutic areas and close to 60 specific disease-related human targets and pathogenic microorganisms. The program will generate 108,000 prokaryotic, 10,260 plant and 6,000 fungal samples for the primary phase of these screens. A comprehensive training and bioinformatics initiative, made possible through major matching funds from Rutgers University and University of Illinois, will strengthen the research and development component of the program and further increase its impact on biodiversity preservation and inventory.