Jeffrey Bland traces common drugs back to their natural sources: metformin from French lilac, statins from red yeast fungi, fish oils from fish. He argues for starting with well-studied natural products before moving to synthetic pharmaceuticals, calling it the right tool at the right time.
Well, I just had the opportunity to do a number of my book tours for our book the Disease Delusion. And the common question that's asked of me is, well, am I against drugs? Is there no place for pharmaceuticals? And the answer is no. The right tool at the right time, the right place and the right person is the right answer. But where do these drugs come from? It's a very interesting question. So let's take three quick examples of drugs that have an interesting origin. One is the drug metformin, which is a common product used for type 2 diabetes. Where did it come from? It turns out it's a chemical modification from a natural product that was derived from French lilac or goatru. And it turns out that this compound that's found in goat's roux, when modified slightly in its chemical structure, forms the drug Metformin. Historically, going way back to medieval times, you'll find that actually Goethe rue extract and concentrate was used for the treatment of what was called sweet urine disease, which we now know as diabetes. So it has a historical root in nature and it gets modified chemically to produce kind of a safe, effective compound. Secondly, another example would be statins. You probably know statins came from what red rice, yeast and other fungus where they were elaborated and were found to lower cholesterol in animals. And then they ultimately became the foundation of a drug called Mevacor or Lovastatin, the first Merck product for the lowering of cholesterol. And then from that other chemical derivatives of that statin backbone called monocolons led to the development of the most common and profitable drug family of all, the statin drug family. But the origin was in nature with people who ate red rice, yeast and other fungus that contained these natural substances. And then the third, of course is fish oils that we see now as a $1.3 billion new category of drugs. Well, they're not really drugs. They're derived from fish. As you know, they have an effect on lowering triglycerides in people with elevated triglycerides. So here are three examples where nature has an intelligence. And in fact that's what we've often said in the disease delusion. Stay with the most commonly state studied and explored compounds which have a history of millions of years through natural selection that are called natural products. That's where we start. Nature molecules. Then, as we need more heavy hitting molecules that have shorter times in our body and block certain enzyme processes, we go to the pharmaceutical products in order to manage more severe illnesses. So there's a place and time for all of this family of array, but we want to start first with the safest, most effective agents that have been studied the longest in nature, which are natural products for modulation of disturbed metabolism. It's a very good way of grading therapies over time and it's the way that we've approached this in the disease delusion.
