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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.
為此，她和她的團(tuán)隊(duì)先是聯(lián)系了幾名傳統(tǒng)醫(yī)藥的醫(yī)生，獲得了15種用來(lái)治療一系列“被忽視的熱帶病”的樣本。有些是干藥草的混合物，有些是稀的混合物。她的目標(biāo)是測(cè)試它們對(duì)實(shí)驗(yàn)室培養(yǎng)的各種致病寄生蟲(chóng)的有效性，目的是分離出它們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.
幾乎所有的樣本對(duì)一種或多種寄生蟲(chóng)都有一定的效果，但其中一個(gè)樣本在對(duì)付引起昏睡病的錐蟲(chóng)時(shí)效果尤其突出，即一種短莖多肉植物蘆薈和常見(jiàn)的蒲公英的干燥混合物。這個(gè)發(fā)現(xiàn)激起了研究團(tuán)隊(duì)的興趣，他們對(duì)正在研究的原始樣品進(jìn)行了兩輪色譜分析，將其分成不同的成分，并對(duì)這些成分進(jìn)行重復(fù)測(cè)試。他們的分析結(jié)果最近剛在《公共科學(xué)圖書(shū)館·被忽視的熱帶疾病》雜志上發(fā)表，結(jié)果顯示他們發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種油，這種油已被驗(yàn)證其殺死錐蟲(chóng)寄生蟲(chóng)的效果比標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的抗錐蟲(chóng)藥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.
對(duì)于許多研究人員來(lái)說(shuō)，這可能意味著他們要去趟專(zhuān)利局并與一家制藥公司就進(jìn)一步的測(cè)試進(jìn)行談判。但對(duì)于多爾卡絲·奧塞-薩福博士來(lái)說(shuō)，重點(diǎn)不是制造精制藥品，而是引導(dǎo)那些生病的人從草藥醫(yī)生那里獲得最好的治療。如果資金允許，她的下一步行動(dòng)將會(huì)試著更好地解釋這種新發(fā)現(xiàn)的油能夠發(fā)揮效力的原因，并確定在什么情況下應(yīng)該推薦使用草藥。
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