The company has signed a new agreement with the university's School of Pharmacy and Center for Pharmacognostic Research on Panamanian Flora (CIFLORPAN) to collect plants that have documented ethnomedicinal uses by native tribes.
Unigen will apply natural product chemistry and high throughput screening to fractionate the Panamanian plant extracts, which will be further tested in its laboratory.
"Panama is among the top 25 most plant-rich countries in the world, with rainforests that provide a perfect level of light intensity, humidity and temperature to yield unique and diverse plants containing the most biodiversity and high nutrient content," said Dr Qi Jia, Unigen's vice president of scientific affairs.
The project is expected to significantly expand Unigen's PhytoLogix ethnomedicinal plant library that currently includes more than 3,000 medicinal plants, over 5,000 plant extracts and 200,000 fractions and compounds.
The Unigen team will work with Dr Mahabir Gupta, principal investigator and director of CIFLORPAN, recently given a Board Archives Award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his efforts to develop pharmaceuticals from natural resources and to promote scientific advances across Ibero-American countries.
Unigen and CIFLORPAN operate in full compliance with the United Nations Convention of Biodiversity.
