Building New Pharmaceutical Capabilities in Central Asia

描述（由申请人提供）：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探索，建设研究和经济能力，发展生态可持续的收获手段，加强培训和国际合作。乌兹别克斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦拥有广泛气候带的多样性和大部分未开发的生物多样性。该项目将整合由五个独立小组进行的广泛的、最先进的、多靶点筛选，采用强大的结构和分析方法，旨在表征和开发由中亚植物、真菌和原核生物产生的治疗剂。该项目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，并得到全面法律协议的支持。将有目的地针对与该地区有关的人类疾病，积极鼓励当地科学家的参与，并维护民族生物学知识。将注意确保公平利益分享和遵守生物多样性条约。与拟议的ICBG项目相关的筛选将涵盖10个主要治疗领域和近60个特定疾病相关的人类靶点和致病微生物。该项目将为这些筛选的初级阶段生成108,000个原核生物样本，10,260个植物样本和6,000个真菌样本。罗格斯大学（Rutgers University）和伊利诺伊大学（University of Illinois）提供了大量配套资金，使一项全面的培训和生物信息学计划成为可能，这将加强该计划的研发部分，并进一步提高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.