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 Hoodia
Research
It was found by a Dutch anthropologist in 1937 that Hoodia plant has been
in use by the San tribe or Bushman from a thousand years to suppress appetite.
But till 1963 there were no studies on Hoodia by the west or the native
government. In 1963 CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research)
of South Africa started studies on Hoodia as they saw some good future
of this indigenous plant. The initials results showed some promise in the
form of lab animals losing weight after consuming Hoodia for a specific
period but it needed more research.
As the time went by some scientists from South Africa started working
with a British firm named Phytopharm and together they were able to isolate
a steroidal glycoside from the plant. It was named p57 by them. At that
point of time the west was fast becoming obese and the pharmaceutical
companies were spending huge amount of money to develop diet pills that
would make patient lose weight easily. As the word spread about Hoodia,
Pfizer started showing some interest in it so as to develop a new Hoodia
drug. So, Pfizer was given the sub-license for developing p57 by Phytopharm
in 1998. But Pfizer could not find anything useful from its research
and recently returned the sub-license to Phytopharm. As for now research
and development on p57 is being done by Phytopharm and Unilever.
Right now research on deriving new weight loss drug from Hoodia is in
full progress. May be in near future these scientists would come with
a weight loss drug that would have the same quality as Hoodia diet pills but would be available in plenty unlike the Hoodia plant which is in
scarcity. The price of Hoodia is skyrocketing because of the fact that
it takes around 4-5 years for a Hoodia plant to fully mature and plantation
of this plant is limited to the region of Kalahari Desert only.
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