Drug utilization developing countries

The developed countries control their pharmaceutical industries in other ways. Environmental regulations, for example, cover transport of finished drugs and intermediate and starting chemicals. Bulk chemicals transported from one site to another are subject to toxicity testing that utilizes... 

With over 250,000 species, the plant kingdom contains biodiversity which reflects known and novel compounds with potential therajjeutic activity (2,82,83). Furthermore, the World Health Organization has estimated that 80% of people in developing countries are dependent upon plant-centered traditional medicines for their primary health care (84). The examples of quinine and artemisinin cited above illustrate the proven utility of compounds from plants in the treatment of malaria. Moreover, it is likely that additional plant-derived antimalarial drugs await discovery since the literature indicates that in vivo or in vitro antimalarial activities have been identified in a broad and varied spectrum of botanical families (85-92). 

It may be stated here that it took nearly 20 years before reserpine got exploited in the pharmaceutical industry in the Western countries and, ajmaline about 10 years longer to get established as an anti-arrhythmic drug, and its industrial exploitation is also restricted to the Western countries. This long time lag between research and developed relating to new therapeutic agents has been mainly due to lack of adequate facilities with us for interdisciplinary researches in the field. In the case of nitro-reserpines and nitro-ajmaline also we have got to note that their utilization would depend on the commercial considerations of the pharmaceutical industry of the developed countries. 

In January 1986 Isicom, a prescription drug used to treat the Parkinson syndrome, went on sale in the former German Democratic Republic. Isicom is a combination of L-dopa [L-dopa=(S)-3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-alanine] and L-carbidopa. For both components, new synthetic procedures were developed independently at the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR and the production of the active substances was realized at the former VEB ISIS-Chemie Zwickau. In this contribution the history and details of the development of the L-dopa process are recounted. For the commercial application of enantioselective catalysis, this is of some importance, since it was the first industrial process utilizing asymmetric complex catalysis to be realized in the former socialistic countries as well as in Europe. 

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