How long was shaman pharmaceuticals in business

With a gushing news release, on 29 September , Jaguar Animal Health launched its first product, an anti-diarrhea pill for calves that is derived from the sangre grado, an Amazonian tree. Jaguar's quarter century trip revolves around the sap of an Amazonian tree used in indigenous peoples' traditional medicine but, until recently, cows had nothing to do with the story.

Investors and customers may not realize that Jaguar is a company in its third incarnation. Most of the products it has announced to date are reformulations of the same ingredients, from the sangre grado Croton lechleri tree, [3] that Jaguar's corporate predecessors sought to sell as human pharmaceuticals for more than two decades.

For the management of Jaguar, work with sangre grado has been a career. For Amazonian indigenous people, the benefits of this spending and corporate activity have been fewer, and the value less clear. Prominent in the first wave of CBD-inspired bioprospectors was a California-based company named Shaman Pharmaceuticals.

Founded in , Shaman was led by the same duo that now runs Jaguar Animal Health - Lisa Conte, an entrepreneur with a knack for fundraising and attracting attention, especially from wealthy American liberals, and Steven King, an ethnobotanist with the environmental cachet of having gone into drug development from a job at the US NGO, The Nature Conservancy.

Unusual among pharmaceutical companies in the mids, Shaman embraced the CBD, at least an idea of it, expressing admiration for indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge, seeking relationships with indigenous peoples' organizations, and declaring its intent to sell and share benefits from drugs derived from traditional medicinal plants, especially from the Amazon.

Many praised it as a good corporate citizen. Shaman was most active in the western Amazon. Shaman supplemented these collections with plants from collaborations in West Africa and possibly other regions. The buzz that Shaman's activity created in South America was hottest around sangre grado, leading to the tree's exploitation by a number of companies in homeopathic-type products and a demand, not always well regulated from medicine and environmental standpoints, for the tree's blood red latex.

The company's promises of benefit sharing had not materialized; its patents were increasingly predatory on traditional knowledge, and its actual benefit sharing paltry at best. Shaman refused to discuss approaches to knowledge other than agglomerating patents on indigenous peoples' plants under its name and exclusive control, a strategy, the company said, that its investors demanded.

Sure, the company had bought some sangre grado for research use, providing a small economic stimulus, and for benefit sharing it had provided a few grants for small community projects, but the vision wasn't materializing. As relationships soured, Shaman hired an activist away from Rainforest Action Network to help manage increasingly thorny exchanges with indigenous peoples and NGOs, and it tried to lower expectations saying that benefits would come when it reached the commercialization stage.

Sort of. Shaman Pharmaceuticals was legally dead, but its leadership had merely molted. A new company named Napo Pharmaceuticals quickly appeared, [5] with the same leadership as Shaman. Napo bought Shaman's key assets out of the previous company's bankruptcy and picked up where Shaman had left off. Napo pursued a strategy of entering into research and development agreements for the sangre grado drug with other, wealthier, companies. The company was only briefly publicly traded before being delisted in With assistance from Glenmark and Salix, a sangre grado drug for treatment of diarrhea in AIDS patients finally achieved US approval at the end of and later in India.

Issue Date : March Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. She said the major shareholders, who approved the company's recent changes were "supportive.

Shaman was delisted by the Nasdaq yesterday and now will trade on the Nasdaq bulletin board, an over-the-counter list. Top shopping picks. Things to do in San Francisco this weekend.

How to install a smoke alarm in your home. The best holiday gifts for campers.