Dr. Ilya Raskin

Dr. Ilya Raskin

Professor II
Plant Science

Foran Hall, Room 226B
59 Dudley Road
Cook College, Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8520
Phone: 732-932-8165 x227
Fax: 732-932-6535
Email: raskin@aesop.rutgers.edu
Web: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~raskin

Education
B.S. (Biology) Brandeis University, 1980
Ph.D. Michigan State University, 1984

Botanical therapeutics are health and wellness products derived from plants and delivered in the form of drugs, dietary supplements (nutraceuticals), functional foods or cosmetic ingredients. The ancient knowledge that plants contain compounds that improve human health and well-being served as the foundation for the pharmaceutical industry as well as for the rapidly growing food supplement and nutraceutical industry. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art biotechnological methods are not often applied to discovering novel biologically active molecules in plants or to increasing their content and efficacy. We rely on the use of sequential MS/MS, real time PCR, bioinformatics and high content cellular assays to identify pharmacologically active phytochemicals and to study their pharmacological activity. Our laboratory utilizes these advanced tools and techniques to discover, develop, characterize and study a new generation of botanical therapeutics. Our scientists also work at the state-of-the-art Rutgers greenhouses and experimental animal facility dedicated to botanical therapeutics research.

Our goal is to discover and develop novel botanical therapeutics from plants, define and enhance their pharmacological effect and assure their efficient production in plant-based systems. As part of this project, we are developing methods for eliciting, collecting, screening and characterizing pharmacologically active natural products and defining nature of their health-promoting interactions. We are particularly interested in plant-derived therapeutics composed of mixtures of synergistically active molecules that simultaneously affect several disease-related therapeutic targets. For our research we rely on the extensive, international networks of collaborations, which includes Universities in at least four countries, US National Institute of Health and several pharmaceutical, consumer health, cosmecutical and food companies. Currently, we are concentrating on anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, anti-diabetes and anti-cancer agents from plants. We target the modes of action that affect the expression of multiple disease-related genes and diseases associated with cellular transduction pathways. Several of the botanical therapeutics discovered and studied in our laboratory are currently in large-scale clinical trials supported by pharmaceutical and health care companies. A large portion of our botanical therapeutics research is funded by Phytomedics Inc. (www.phytomedics.com), a rapidly growing botanical therapeutics company spun-off from Rutgers in 1996. Our affiliation with Phytomedics provides a direct connection to a large population of patients in need of botanical therapeutics and directs our research to the most important health applications.

Our laboratory serves as the headquarters of a major “International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups” (ICBG) research project that involves two Central Asia countries, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and a large group of Rutgers University scientists (http://aesop.rutgers.edu/~icbg/index.html). ICBG is a joint initiative between The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It funds research, educational activities in the areas of biodiversity conservation, economic capacity and human health through discovery and development of natural therapeutic agents for major human diseases. The ICBG program provides substantial resources to explore the biodiversity of Central Asia and to facilitate educational and cultural exchanges with these friendly countries. The unifying theme of the ICBG program is the concept that the discovery and development of pharmaceuticals and other useful agents from natural products can, under appropriate circumstances, promote economic opportunities and enhanced research capacity in developing countries while conserving the biological resources from which these products are derived. Equitable benefit sharing with host country stakeholders and participants is an important component of the overall program.

Our Central Asia ICBG program collects and screens natural products extracted from plants, fungi and bacteria from one of the least explored regions in the world. The success of Rutgers proposal is built on existing collaborations with at least 40 leading scientists in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan who are actively involved in the program. Other partners and subcontractors for the Rutgers ICBG Program include University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), which utilizes its state-of-the-art structural chemistry facility to isolate and characterize bioactive extract components and Missouri Botanical Garden and Illinois Natural History Survey, which serve as the depositories for the herbaria collections produced by the program. The program also involves industrial and academic partners capable of providing research, development and commercialization assistance.

We are also working with scientists from Africa, Middle East, South America and Eastern Europe on pharmacological bioprospecting and ethnobotanical research using a successful model pioneered by the ICBG program.

In collaboration with NJ Experiment Station and NJ farming community we are developing an agricultural system suitable for the large-scale, standardized production of botanical therapeutics. Today’s agriculture mainly supplies people with calories and basic nutrients. However, in the near future, world agriculture will start producing crops and crop products that prevent and treat diseases while increasing human longevity, productivity, and quality of life. This health-oriented agriculture (‘pharming’) must develop and adopt new highly-controlled cultivation methods that treat a green plant like a chemical plant, thus guaranteeing reliable standardized and optimized production of bioactives. We hope that our work will enable future farmers to move to the forefront of pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, and chemical manufacturing, while attaining better value for their crops than is presently possible through conventional agriculture. Our laboratory is actively collaborating with NJ hydroponic growers with a goal to develop new pharming technologies and to study their effects on the production of botanical therapeutics.

Protein phytosecretion is a cost-effective, platform technology developed in our laboratory. This process fully harnesses the biosynthetic capacity of a green plant to produce recombinant proteins and combines it with a method for the continuous and non-destructive recovery of these proteins from root exudates and guttation fluid of a living plant. Recombinant proteins produced in multicellular eukaryotic systems such as plants, are more likely to retain correct post-translational processing required for the biological activity of many pharmacologically important proteins. In addition, recombinant biopharmaceutical proteins purified from plant exudates are less likely to be contaminated with pathogenic viruses, which may be present in the milk or urine of transgenic animals. We have also developed and successfully tested novel molecular approaches of increasing and regulating the expression of recombinant proteins in plants that further increase the efficiency of phytosecretion.

Gene Amplification Technology (GAT) uses a regulatory sequence (amplification signal) isolated from the untranslated intergenic region of tobacco ribosomal DNA. Following transformation and integration into the genome, this sequence promotes the amplification (increase in copy number) of genes adjacent to it. This increases transcription and translation of a recombinant or homologous gene, resulting in major increases in the expression of a desired protein and an associated phenotypic trait. GAT may also provide an invaluable molecular tool for breeding by reducing the time necessary to enhance the expression of desirable traits naturally present in crop plants. We are particularly interested in applying GAT to increase the content of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical plant compounds that are being developed by our laboratory.

Lila M.A. and I. Raskin. 2004. Health-related interactions of phytochemicals. J Food Science (in press).

Raskin, I. and C. Ripoll. 2004. Can an apple a day keep the doctor away? Curr. Pharm. Design 10 :3419-3429.

Cornwell, T., W. Cohick and I. Raskin. 2004. Dietary phytoestrogens and health. Phytochemistry 65: 995-1016.

Yakoby, N. and I. Raskin. 2004. A simple method to determine trypsin and chymotrypsin inhibitory activity. J. Biochem. Biophys. Methods. 59: 241-251.

Hector, R.J., J.E. Simon, M.M.Ramboatiana, B.O. Roland, A.S. Garvey, I. Raskin. 2004. Malagasy aromatic plants: essential oils, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities. Acta Horticulturae (Proceedings of the XXVI International Horticultural Congress, 2002) 629: 77-81.

Komarnytsky, S., N. Borisjuk, A. Gaume, A. Garvey, N. Borisjuk and I. Raskin. 2004. A quick and efficient system for antibiotic-free expression of heterologous genes in tobacco roots. Plant Cell Reports 22: 765-773.

Ribnicky, D.M., A. Poulev, J. O’Neal, G. Wnorowski, D.E. Malek, R. Jäger,
I. Raskin. 2003. Toxicological Evaluation of the Ethanolic Extract of Artemisia dracunculus L. for Use as a Dietary Supplement and in Functional Foods. J. Food Chem. Tox. 42: 585-598.

Moreno, D.A., N. Ilic, A. Poulev, D.L. Brasaemle, S. Fried, and I. Raskin. 2003. Inhibitory effect of grape seed extract in lipases. Nutrition 19: 876-879.

Gaume, A., S. Komarnytsky, N. Borisjuk and I. Raskin. 2003. Rhizosecretion of recombinant proteins from plant hairy roots. Plant Cell Reports 21: 1188-1193.

Ribnicky, D.M., A. Poulev, and I. Raskin. 2003. The determination of salicylates in Gaultheria procumbens for use as a natural aspirin alternative. J. Nutraceuticals, Functional and Med. Foods 4: 39-52.

Poulev, A., J.M. O’Neal, S. Logendra, R.B. Pouleva, V. Timeva, A.S. Garvey, D. Gleba, I.S. Jenkins, B.T. Halpern, R. Kneer, G.M. Cragg, and I. Raskin. 2003. Elicitation – a new window into plant chemodiversity and phytochemical drug discovery. J. Med. Chem. 46: 2542-2547.

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Last update:01/14/05