Home

Data Collection

Participants

Publications

Meetings and
presentations

Press releases

Links & Resources

for more information send e-mail to
dushenkov@
aesop.rutgers.edu

The International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) Program is a unique effort that addresses the interdependent issues of drug discovery, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable economic growth. Funding for this program has been provided by six components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Biological Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Foreign Agriculture Service of the USDA.

BUILDING NEW PHARMACEUTICAL CAPABILITIES IN CENTRAL ASIA

The Central Asia ICBG program facilitates the development of the natural product-based pharmaceutical capabilities in Central Asia while encouraging biodiversity conservation and exploration, building research and economic capacity, developing ecologically-sustainable harvesting means and enhancing training and international cooperation. Central Asia possesses diverse and largely unexplored biodiversity spread over a wide range of climatic zones. The program integrates wide-ranging, state-of-the art, multiple-target screens performed by five separate groups with powerful structural and analytical approaches designed to characterize and develop therapeutic agents produced by plants, fungi and prokaryotes. Human diseases relevant to this region are being purposely targeted, involvement of the local scientists actively encouraged and the ethnobiological knowledge upheld. Care is being taken to assure equitable benefit sharing and biodiversity treaties compliance. A comprehensive training and bioinformatics initiative is strengthening the research and development component of the program and is increasing its impact on biodiversity preservation and inventory.

CENTRAL ASIA COLLABORATORS

Kyrgyz partners: Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute, Kyrgyz Agricultural Academy (composed of five research institutes), Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences and the Kyrgyz National Botanical Garden.

Tajik partners: Tajik State Medical University, Tajik State National University, Ministry of Agriculture and Environment Protection of the Republic of Tajikistan and the International institute for study of Avicenna heritage and pharmacology.

Kazakh partners: Institute of Microbiology and Virology, Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and the Kazakh National Medical University named after S.D. Asfendiyarov.

Former Partners in Uzbekistan: Tashkent State Agrarian University, Uzbek Scientific Institute of Botany, Uzbek Scientific Research Institute of Forestry, Uzbek Institute of Microbiology of the National Academy of Sciences, Cardiology Institute of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Institute of Oncology of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Uzbekistan .

U.S. partners: Rutgers University, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Missouri Botanical Garden

© Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey