CETC Committee Member, Ke Yang, assembled four diverse speakers for our October seminar, entitled "Natural Medicine", which attracted an audience of almost 50 attendees.

Daryl Rees, Chief Operating Officer of Phytopharm, opened the session. His company has specialities in functional food and pharmaceuticals derived from plants. It is a virtual business with manufacture outsourced and the patented products licensed to pharma and food companies across the world. Particular target treatments are for Alzheimer's, motor neurone afflictions, eczema and asthma. Daryl outlined how the Alzheimer's remedy worked: that neurotropics reverse the demise of the neurons in the brain, giving the patient a better and longer mental capacity than he would otherwise have had. Animal and human trials are very promising. Motor neurone disease was responding to a Chinese herb compound and in the food sector an exciting discovery that Hoodia, a South African desert plant, could suppress the appetite, had persuaded Unilever to buy a licence. Canine eczema was responding well to a Chinese plant compound of over 20 plants. In summing up, Daryl said that they were making Chinese medicine work: they had cracked the code.

Mike Dawson, is Research Director of Novacta Biosystems, a company started in 2003. Novacta uses microbes and their enzymes, which Mike described as "clever chemists", for a range of medical treatments. Microbial products are well established in tackling cholesterol techniques, but Novacta sees considerable scope for microbial remedies to supplant the antibiotics to which bugs are becoming resistant - such as MRSA, which is such a topical problem in UK hospitals. Through metagenomics we can take the DNA of a bug, clone it and change it, using peptides to kill the pathogenic organism. These are called lantibiotics and they are being deployed for oncological and antiviral purposes. Big growth is expected through licensing.

Dr John Wu, Chairman of the Chinese Medicine Management Association took us on a cultural tour of Chinese medicine and philosophy under the banner of "you are what you eat". Fire, earth, metal, water and wood are the key constituents of life, whether we are talking about human life, business management, the body, senses or diet. The Chinese have followed these principles for 5,000 years. Within the circle of these elements there are control lines balancing the elements. In food/medicine terms, eating Fire (sugar, fat and proteins) gives you energy; Earth is root vegetables giving you daily food; Metal is herbs and skins that are hot, harsh, pungent and bitter and these give you medicinal food. They are not nice to eat he says but it only works if it hurts! Water is the nuts and spices that make you feel healthy and items such as mushroom spores that make you younger! Finally Wood represents fruit and green vegetables, which make you look healthy. John feels that Westerners do not eat enough seeds.

Robert Howard, Group Finance Director of William Ransom & Son plc then took the floor. The company is the oldest botanical extraction company in the UK (founded in 1846) and now has 200 employees and £35M turnover. A key skill of the company has always been the optimisation of yields from its plant sources, understanding how, when and where to extract and to store. The company is notable for its recent expansion programme, which has included the acquisition from David Wilkie, the Olympic gold medallist swimmer, of a company which is the major supplier of Glucosamine to the domestic market. The company both supplies to other companies and has some own label retail products. Research is being undertaken into senna, echinacea, nutrachemicals and cannabis, the latter for arthritis and migraine. The effects of regulation in the natural medicine sector are a major influence on business strategy. With registration of a product costing at least £50,000, smaller products and smaller suppliers are being squeezed out of the market, which is consolidating. While this may mean lesser consumer choice, it should mean safer and better-tested products and the elimination of "snake oil" products.

The Club is very fortunate in benefiting from the sponsorship of the following organisations:-

There are also other companies who give us generous help with specific meetings and services.

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