It’s called the Devil’s Claw, a sprawling, ground-hugging plant native to Southern Africa, primarily the Kalahari Desert. And it is revered as a medicinal herb, especially for the anti-inflammatory properties that make it useful for treating arthritis, among other ailments. Natives of Southern Africa have been using it for medicinal purposes for centuries.
However, it’s also rare. And in modern times, the fate of rare plants that hold medicinal value is often not a happy one.
The Devil’s Claw is in luck, though. Scientists who have recognized both its value to medicine and its precarious situation have begun establishing “biofactories” where they are developing techniques they hope will allow them to produce the same rare extracts contained in the plants in large quantities without depleting them in nature.
That was the gist of a report delivered by Milen I. Georgiev, Ph.D., to the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, according to an article at ScienceDaily.com.
One group of scientists reported a major advance toward that goal at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). They described the first successful method of producing the active ingredients in Devil’s Claw — ingredients that have made the Devil’s Claw a sensation in alternative medicine in Europe. Their technique may eventually lead to the development of “biofactories” that could produce huge quantities of rare plant extracts quickly and at little cost.