Natural products commercial markets

There are two main advantages of acrylamide—acryUc-based flocculants which have allowed them to dominate the market for polymeric flocculants in many appHcation areas. The first is that these polymers can be made on a commercial scale with molecular weights up to 10—15 million which is much higher than any natural product. The second is that their electrical charge in solution and the charge density can be varied over a wide range by copolymerizing acrylamide with a variety of functional monomers or by chemical modification. 

A number of higher poly(vinyl ether)s, in particular the ethyl and butyl polymers, have found use as adhesives. When antioxidants are incorporated, pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes from poly(vinyl ethyl ether) are said to have twice the shelf life of similar tapes from natural rubber. Copolymers of vinyl isobutyl ether with methyl acrylate and ethyl acrylate (Acronal series) and with vinyl chloride have been commercially marketed. The first two products have been used as adhesives and impregnating agents for textile, paper and leather whilst the latter (Vinoflex MP 400) has found use in surface coatings. 

Again, the answer should be fairly obvious. The potential therapeutic value of the steroid hormones makes these of tremendous commercial value. The commercial market for these is of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. There is no comparable market for sterols and bile salts. We are faced with the interesting situation, therefore, that sterols are relatively abundant in natural sources but of relatively low commercial value, whilst steroids occur naturally at very low concentrations but are of great commercial value. Although there are tremendous variations amongst different products, steroids with desirable properties command market prices that are (ten to one thousand fold) greater than their sterol counterparts. 

The use of natural products as medicine has invoked the isolation of active compounds the first commercial pure natural product introduced for therapeutic use is generally considered to be the narcotic morphine (1), marketed by Merck in 1826, and the first semi-synthetic pure dmg aspirin (2), based on a natural product salicin (3) isolated from Salix alba, was introduced by Bayer in 1899. This success subsequently led to the isolation of early dmgs such as cocaine, codeine, digitoxin (4), quinine (5), and pilocarpine (6), of which some are still in use. ... 

DoD is not just another purchaser in a commercial market, however. It becomes a developer of drugs when demand is mainly or exclusively for military use. Under these circumstances, DoD requirements for CBW defense drugs involve the department in the full spectrum of research, development, testing for safety and effectiveness through clinical trials or alternate means, production, acquisition, and issues of medical use. (This may also be the case for naturally occurring diseases that rarely appear in the United States and for which the domestic civilian market is limited.)... 

The effect of echinacea on the immune system is controversial. In vivo human studies using commercially marketed formulations of E purpurea have shown increased phagocytosis, total circulating white blood cells, monocytes, neutrophils, and natural killer cells but not immunostimulation. In vitro, Epurpurea juice increased production of interleukins-1, -6, and -10, and tumor necrosis factor- by human macrophages. Enhanced natural killer cell activity and antibody-dependent cellular toxicity was also observed with E purpurea extract in cell lines from both healthy and immunocompromised patients. Studies using the isolated purified polysaccharides from Epurpurea have also shown cytokine activation. Polysaccharides by themselves, however, are unlikely to accurately reproduce the activity of the entire extract. 

Further, it is widely appreciated that many natural products do not have appropriate physical and chemical properties for direct development as pharmaceutical agents. That is, their stability, their solubility, their bioavailability, etc. may be limiting to application of the natural product as a pharmaceutical. Finally, there is concern that actual quantities of a particular natural product may not be available to supply a commercial market should one be developed. That is, there is the perception that it will take too much plant material, thereby depleting natural populations, etc. in order to provide material for market need. I have addressed all of these perceptions in other publications.1 4 All of them can be reasonably and adequately addressed. 

Currently pest control by natural plant extracts is practiced primarily by subsistence farmers in those less developed part of the world where it is still an economic necessity.(ref. 3). Of the approximately 2000 plant species with known insecticidal properties (ref. 4), few have been developed commercially. These include the pyrethrins, rotenones and some of the alkaloids. Pyrethrins were the most important natural plant extracts in the early commercial insecticide formulations and were already in use in Persia and Yugoslavia during the early 1800s. By 1939 pyrethrum imports to the United States were 13-5 million lbs, declining from this peak as the synthetic analogs (e.g., the allethrins) appeared on the market. The addition of stabilizers (antioxidants) and synergists to the original pyrethrum formulations saved the natural product from commercial extinction. Currently the demand for pyrethrum flowers is still over 25,000 tons per annum—met by hand-harvested crops from Ecuador, Kenya and Tanzania (ref. 5) ... 

Concerns about deception and trust are at the heart of deliberations over what is considered ecologically clean when products are sold in commercial markets. Russian consumers who suspect that industrially produced and commercially marketed foods and beverages are tainted put their trust in nature instead. As one man in his late fifties commented, Here there is no kind of guarantee. Here no one is certain if foods have additives, if they are healthy or poisonous. And then it becomes clear, it turns out that at all the firms there is no one responsible. A married couple put it more simply in their comments that natural products were superior to anything industrially produced because it is impossible to deceive nature You cannot fool [or cheat] nature [prirodu ne obmanesh ] ... 

Moving on to discuss specific market sectors, I thought I would chart the history of the key milestones in the development of animal health natural product drugs. Whilst the intention is that this review should be an objective discussion of important academic and industrial discoveries, as this is very much a personal perspective, it has been difficult not to include a tinge of commercial bias. Therefore, I chose my starting point as 1849. 

Whilst santonin was not primarily an Animal Health drug, it is a natural product with anthelmintic properties and, as we shall see later, today s antiparasitic market is dominated by a single class of natural products. Although since then, plant metabolites have played a commercial role, the major impact has been made by microbial natural products. 

Most of the structures we have seen today have been stereochemically complex. The only cost effective manufacturing process is by fermentation. In addition, we have seen that products for the livestock market have to have minimal cost to command commercial acceptance - this effectively limits total synthesis to simple structures, made in a few steps. Such favourable cost of goods is a point in favour of natural product drugs, though even this becomes weakened if more than one or two additional semisynthetic steps are required to yield final product. 

Although Vitamin C is not a commodity chemical and is manufactured by a sequential process that involves hydrogenation, oxidation, acetonide formation, oxidation, hydrolysis, and formation of the vitamin, this example illustrates that complex multistep processes are not excluded from commercial use and can yield products competitive with the natural product. Natural vitamin C for the commercial market is also extracted from certain plants. 

Proponents of this view forget or ignore, I think, the fact that in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labor (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. Karl Polanyi s classic, The Great Transformation (Boston Beacon Press, 1957), is still perhaps the best case against pure market logic. 

Traders lacked regular supplies of good quality products and that the scale of natmal products operations may be a bottleneck as were the lack of information, lack of capital, low product quality and assurance mechanisms, difficulty in accessing financial credit and loans at reasonable rates, and poor facilities and processing equipment, and little historical investment into this sector. Furthermore, they reported from their survey of the traders themselves that the domestic markets of wholesalers and retailers are largely at low levels of commercialization in general traders have limited technical knowledge about natural products, and limited capital to expand their businesses and exploit... 

Relative to the still highly informal nature of the natural products trade, there many factors responsible for this low international market share. Some of these include (1) The lack of ethnobotanical information on the uses, attributes and commercial value of African plants and their products (2) The lack of quality standards, weak control and product standardization practices (3)... 

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