The market and public benefits of Tibetan and other traditional medicines have gone unrealized primarily due to the lack of appropriate scientific support and IP protection, which have been the deterring financial factors for research investment in traditional herbal therapeutics.¹

Our Director of Materia Medica is co-inventor of a patent-pending technology, developed through a competitive National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grant, and through our previous research collaboration, that can produce herbal products that meet the standards of modern science with drug-like reproducibility and provide previously unavailable IP protection, all at a minute fraction of current product development costs of OTC and Rx drugs. We can tap into the extensive knowledge of documented traditional medicine to produce unique, patent-protected safe and effective products in three major segments of the healthcare and personal-care fields:

• Dietary supplements or traditional herbal therapeutics
• Cosmetics and personal care
• High-yield discovery route to OTC and Rx

Work would entail developing physicochemical and genomic profiles for each of the most promising herbal ingredients and formulas prior to developing quality monographs, securing IP and initiating modern clinical research.

Until recently there has been no system to establish therapeutic equivalency for herbs grown outside of their traditional habitat or substitutable similar herbs. An increase in demand for Tibetan medicine would lead to an unsustainable demand on raw material grown in the native habit of the Himalayas. This has led to environmental damage, adulteration and potential loss of tradition.

By utilizing patent-pending technology we can establish alternate sustainable sources of herbs for the demands of modern commerce. We have already sponsored an initial exploratory trip to several bioregions in the American west and identified sustainable wild populations and potential sites for propagation of Tibetan medicinal plants. A characterization research laboratory, at least one research farm, and additional contract growing sites will be used for production.

¹ Pennyroyal G, Dhondup L, Husted C. A Review of Medicinal Plant Patents. Recent Patents on Biomedical Engineering, 2011; 4:126 -138.