UT Dallas pain researcher Dr. Benedict Kolber has taken the quest for new non-opioid medications halfway across the world. Kolber leads an international collaboration to analyze traditional treatments used in the Central African nation of Cameroon and discover the most beneficial compounds they contain, hoping to find a potent pain solution that can be refined for pharmaceutical use.

“Opiates are from the poppy plant; aspirin derives from the bark of the willow tree,” Kolber said. “In the U.S., we use Echinacea, ginger root, curcumin and so many natural products. Ginseng, fish oil, omega-3 and turmeric — the list goes on. We’re investigating traditional medicine because there are many untapped opportunities here.”

The new partnership has Cameroonian scientists performing initial screenings, then sending extracts to Kolber’s lab for identification and testing. The pure compounds go back to Cameroon for final evaluation. NIH funding also supports efforts to enable Cameroonian scientists to perform as much of the work as possible locally by building up capabilities and infrastructure.

The program has yielded four academic papers thus far, including two this summer: in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology about a soapberry shrub called Paullinia pinnata, and in ACS Omega about the paperbark thorn.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and partner institutions have discovered that compounds made by certain gut bacteria can help the immune system fight cancer. The study, published in Cell Reports Medicine, identified a gut bacterium called Bacteroides uniformis that appears to slow melanoma tumor growth.