"Western nations claim much of the glory when it comes to biotechnology, but scientists elsewhere are making substantial progress.

SIMONE BADAL MCCREATH: Jamaica’s natural biotech wealth

Research fellow and lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.

Jamaica is blessed with sun, sea, sand and a wealth of natural resources — it ranks fifth among the world’s islands in terms of endemic species.

“That means these products, these plants are nowhere else,” says Simone Badal McCreath, a research fellow in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. “Which means we are sitting on novel compounds that, once assessed against a wide array of biological activities, could help to make products that can treat Huntington’s disease or neurological disorders, for example.”

Badal McCreath’s interest in the potential of naturally derived compounds goes back to her PhD, when she was working on their anticancer properties. “Natural products display a wide array of biological activities, and I suppose you could say that was how my interest or love for biotechnology developed,” she says. During her research on natural sources of anticancer compounds, she realized that most cancer cell lines used to study these compounds were from white people.

“It got me thinking, would these compounds be just as effective against cell lines of African origin?” she says. “So I went and I searched for African cell lines, and I recognized that there were no cell lines that represented the Caribbean.”

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