School hosts London BioNat Network Research meeting
Wednesday 27 March 2013
On 13th march the School's Medicines Research Group (MRG) hosted the London BioNat Network Research meeting for the first time. More than 65 scientists attended from UCL School of Pharmacy, King’s College London, Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Trinity College Dublin and several Natural Product companies. Seminars covered Pharmacognosy, Natural Product Chemistry, Ethnopharmacology and Biopharmaceuticals. Professor Neville Punchard, Dean of the School of Health, Sport and Bioscience, formally welcomed attendees. This was a themed conference debated recent research on commercial aspects of natural products and ethnopharmacology. Highlights included:-
- Concerning cosmetics - Professor Peter Houghton, Emeritus Professor at KCL and Honorary Research Associate at Kew Gardens, presented constituents of Rhubarb responsible for tyrosinase inhibition of consequence in skin-lightening products.
- Dr Helen Sheridan, Associate Professor and Head of Pharmacognosy at Trinity College Dublin, who developed an enterpreneurial approach to moving a natural product from ethnic knowledge to market with case studies from TCD Pharmacognosy Research.
- Early Career Researchers Ms Aljawharah Alqathama (MSc student, UCL School of Pharmacy) presented opportunistic natural products against melanoma migration and Ms Frances Watkins, (MRG PhD student) highlighted significant antimicrobial activity for selected 10th Century Anglo-Saxon wound healing formulations from British native plants of biodiversity relevance.
- Dr Bob Allkin, Information Projects Manager at Kew and manager of the global resource ThePlantList (http://www.theplantlist.org/) stressed the key significance of identifying and naming medicinal plants correctly, giving examples of Brazilian medicinal plants in indigenous use.
- Finally, Dr Barbara Pendry, UK HMAC Advisory Committee, Editor-in-Chief Journal of Herbal Medicine (Elsevier, Germany) and Principal Lecturer at UEL ended with a plenary on the evolving regulation of herbal medicine practitioners by the UK Government.
Posters highlighted the significance of medical plant extracts and compounds as anti-infective agents against MRSA (Dr Rahman’s group at UEL), anti-inflammatory agents (Drs Ayoub and Pendry’s Group at UEL), anticancer agents (Dr Sheridan’s Group at TCD and Drs Ayoub and Pendry’s Group at UEL) and 10th Century manuscripts on Anglo-Saxon wound-healing formulations (Dr Corcoran’s group at UEL).
This meeting strengthened collaborative research among London BioNat Network partners and was co-chaired by Drs Mukhlesur Rahman and Olivia Corcoran of the Medicines Research Group at UEL.
