经济学人下载:传统医药--专治疑难杂症(2)

To do so, she and her team first contacted several practitioners of traditional medicine and obtained samples of 15 treatments employed against a range of NTDS. Some were mixtures of dried herbs, others watery concoctions. Her goal was to test their effectiveness against laboratory cultures of a variety of disease-causing parasites, with the aim of isolating any active principles they might contain.

为此，她和她的团队先是联系了几名传统医药的医生，获得了15种用来治疗一系列“被忽视的热带病”的样本。有些是干药草的混合物，有些是稀的混合物。她的目标是测试它们对实验室培养的各种致病寄生虫的有效性，目的是分离出它们可能包含的任何活性成分。

Nearly all the samples had some effect against one or more parasites. But one stood out in particular when used against the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness. This was a dried mix of Aloe vera, a short-stemmed succulent, and Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion. Intrigued by that discovery, the team put the crude sample they were working on through two rounds of chromatography, to split it into its constituents, and repeated the tests on these. Their analysis, just published in plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, revealed an oil which proved 30% more effective at killing trypanosome parasites than did diminazene aceturate, the standard anti-trypanosomal drug
 

几乎所有的样本对一种或多种寄生虫都有一定的效果，但其中一个样本在对付引起昏睡病的锥虫时效果尤其突出，即一种短茎多肉植物芦荟和常见的蒲公英的干燥混合物。这个发现激起了研究团队的兴趣，他们对正在研究的原始样品进行了两轮色谱分析，将其分成不同的成分，并对这些成分进行重复测试。他们的分析结果最近刚在《公共科学图书馆·被忽视的热带疾病》杂志上发表，结果显示他们发现了一种油，这种油已被验证其杀死锥虫寄生虫的效果比标准的抗锥虫药物乙酰氨基苯酯要高出30%。

For many researchers, that would have been the cue for a trip to the patent office and negotiations with a drug company about further rounds of testing. But for Dr Osei-Safo the point is not to make a refined pharmaceutical, but rather to direct those who are ill towards the best treatments available from herbalists. Her next move, funding permitting, will be to try to understand better why the newly discovered oil is effective, and to establish in what circumstances the herbal remedy from which it is derived should be recommended. 

对于许多研究人员来说，这可能意味着他们要去趟专利局并与一家制药公司就进一步的测试进行谈判。但对于多尔卡丝·奥塞-萨福博士来说，重点不是制造精制药品，而是引导那些生病的人从草药医生那里获得最好的治疗。如果资金允许，她的下一步行动将会试着更好地解释这种新发现的油能够发挥效力的原因，并确定在什么情况下应该推荐使用草药。