Why Biomedical and Conservation Scientists Must Work Together

Medicine and nature have always been deeply connected. From the aspirin derived from willow bark to the cancer-fighting compounds found in tropical plants, a significant share of the drugs in use today trace their origins to living organisms. Yet the very ecosystems that hold this pharmaceutical promise are disappearing at an alarming pace. Biodiversity loss is not just an environmental crisis – it is a medical one too. This is exactly why biomedical scientists and conservation biologists can no longer afford to work in isolation. Their goals are inseparable, and the case for collaboration has never been stronger.

Shared goals in biodiversity conservation 🔗

At first glance, biomedical research and conservation biology seem like distant fields. One operates in laboratories, developing drugs and therapies; the other works in forests, reefs, and wetlands, protecting species and ecosystems. But the two disciplines share a foundational interest: the preservation of biological diversity.

Nature is, in effect, the world’s largest pharmacy. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), around 80% of registered medicines either come from plants or have been inspired by natural products. The global trade in medicinal plants alone may exceed US $2.5 billion annually. Beyond plants, organisms ranging from marine invertebrates and fungi to soil microbes have yielded compounds that underpin modern medicine. Research published in Plants, People, Planet confirms that plants and fungi have provided or inspired key pharmaceuticals for cancer, heart disease, dementia, and malaria – conditions that affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

For biomedical scientists, biodiversity is a living library of molecular solutions refined by billions of years of evolution. For conservationists, demonstrating the tangible value of species to human health is one of the most powerful arguments for protecting them. This convergence of interest is the natural starting point for collaboration.

Impact of biodiversity loss on medicine 🔗

The scale of current biodiversity loss is staggering, and its consequences for medicine are direct and severe. A landmark paper published in the Journal of Global Health by the Bio2Bio (Biodiversity-to-Biomedicine) Consortium notes that modern extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times greater than those recorded in previous eras – and known species go extinct at a rate far exceeding the discovery of new ones. The same research estimates that the planet is losing at least one important drug candidate every two years as species disappear.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Many species with potential medical value have not yet been scientifically assessed. Tropical forests, which cover less than 7% of the Earth’s land surface today, are home to a disproportionate concentration of biological and chemical diversity. As researchers working in Suriname and Madagascar have noted, the loss of these habitats results in the permanent extinction of plant and animal species that could have yielded previously unknown drug candidates for diseases including cancer, malaria, and tuberculosis.

The loss is not limited to organisms alone. Traditional knowledge – the accumulated understanding of indigenous communities about how plants and animals can be used medicinally – disappears alongside the cultures and ecosystems that produced it. The Bio2Bio Consortium warns that this twin loss of biological and cultural diversity simultaneously removes the compounds themselves and the contextual knowledge needed to identify where to look for them. In practical terms, every species that goes extinct is a door permanently closed on a potential treatment – for diseases we already know, and for those we may face in the future.

Collaborative research models 🔗

Recognising this shared vulnerability, scientists and institutions have developed structured models to bring biomedical and conservation communities together. These frameworks don’t just encourage occasional cooperation – they embed conservation objectives directly into drug discovery programs.

The International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) 🔗

One of the most significant examples is the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program, launched in 1992 through a joint initiative of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The ICBG was built on the recognition that drug discovery, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable economic growth are interdependent – and that pursuing any one of these goals effectively requires addressing the others simultaneously.

Each ICBG project brings together academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, conservation organisations, and host-country partners. Projects have operated across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The University of Illinois at Chicago ICBG program, working across Vietnam and Laos over 18 years, collected more than 5,500 plant samples from over 2,000 species – evaluating them for potential activity against cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and influenza. Alongside drug discovery, the program built capacity for biodiversity inventory, established threatened plant rescue centres, and implemented conservation education. The approach demonstrates that drug discovery and conservation work can be designed as a single integrated effort rather than competing priorities.

The Bio2Bio consortium model 🔗

A more recent collaborative structure is the Bio2Bio (Biodiversity-to-Biomedicine) Consortium, an international network of early-career scientists spanning disciplines from ecology and ethnobotany to pharmacology and policy. The consortium advocates for standardising natural products research, including documentation of therapeutic potential, ecological availability, and sustainable trade. It also prioritises building online databases to systematically record traditional medicinal knowledge and connecting governmental, research, and medical organisations around common protocols for natural product development. Crucially, it operates under ethical frameworks designed to protect indigenous communities’ intellectual property and ensure equitable benefit sharing – a vital component if host nations and local communities are to see conservation as genuinely worthwhile.

Nagoya Protocol and benefit-sharing frameworks 🔗

At the policy level, the Nagoya Protocol – a supplementary agreement under the Convention on Biological Diversity – provides the legal backbone for equitable collaboration. It requires that researchers accessing genetic resources in another country must obtain prior informed consent and share benefits fairly with the source country and its communities. This framework matters enormously for conservation: when local communities and governments receive a direct economic stake in the biodiversity within their borders, they gain a tangible incentive to protect it. The CBD and WHO have both called on the pharmaceutical industry to mainstream biodiversity considerations into their operations, including environmental risk assessment and sustainable sourcing commitments.

Case studies of successful collaborations 🔗

Theory and policy frameworks are only meaningful if they translate into real outcomes. Several collaborations provide compelling evidence that integrating biomedical research with conservation does produce results – both scientific and environmental.

Taxol and the Pacific yew: a cautionary lesson that shaped collaboration 🔗

The story of paclitaxel (marketed as Taxol) is both one of medicine’s great successes and a lesson in what happens when biomedical exploitation proceeds without conservation oversight. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) confirmed that bark extracts from the Pacific yew tree (Taxus brevifolia) could kill cancer cells – a discovery that eventually produced one of the most important chemotherapy drugs in history, used to treat breast, ovarian, lung, and pancreatic cancers. Taxol now appears on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines.

But the early stages of production revealed a serious conflict between medical need and conservation. Research published in Molecular Biology of the Cell describes how a 200-year-old Pacific yew tree yielded only enough paclitaxel for two cancer patient doses, and stripping the bark killed the tree. Demand for the drug threatened to drive the species toward endangerment. Kew Gardens notes that the Pacific yew was already under pressure from logging when the medical crisis around supply emerged. The response – a collaboration between chemists, ecologists, and policy makers – eventually produced a semisynthetic route using needles and twigs from more abundant related yew species, ending the destructive harvesting of wild trees. This case made it plain that biomedical progress depends on the health of natural populations, and that conservation expertise must be part of pharmaceutical development from the outset.

The Suriname and Madagascar ICBG programs 🔗

The Suriname and Madagascar ICBG programs are among the most documented examples of integrated conservation and drug discovery. Both projects combined systematic botanical surveys of tropical plant diversity with screening for bioactive compounds against cancer, malaria, and other diseases. Conservation organisations – including the Missouri Botanical Garden and Conservation International – were directly embedded within the research partnerships, contributing to biodiversity inventories, sustainable harvesting protocols, and benefit-sharing agreements with local communities.

In Madagascar, plant extracts were screened for anticancer, immunological, and antimalarial activities. In Suriname, compounds from the plant Ipomoea squamosa showed promising in vitro activity against cancer cell lines and attracted attention from both pharmaceutical firms and academic researchers. Although neither program had produced a market-ready drug by the time of the studies, both generated significant outcomes: detailed biodiversity inventories for conservation planning, capacity building for local scientists and institutions, and frameworks for community benefit-sharing that increased the economic value of preserved forests. The programs demonstrated that conservation organisations and biomedical researchers could work as genuine partners – not simply as resource provider and extractor.

Vinblastine, vincristine, and the Madagascar periwinkle 🔗

Research in Plants, People, Planet highlights that the chemotherapy drugs vincristine and vinblastine – both derived from the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) – are among the clearest examples of why species preservation translates directly into life-saving medicine. These drugs remain drugs of choice for treating paediatric leukaemia. Their discovery followed leads from indigenous knowledge, which directed researchers to the plant in the first place. Had the species been lost to deforestation before its chemistry was understood, an entire class of cancer treatment would not exist.

What makes collaboration work 🔗

Across these examples, several conditions consistently support successful partnerships between biomedical and conservation communities. Clear benefit-sharing agreements ensure that host countries and local communities are genuine stakeholders, not passive subjects of research. Multidisciplinary teams – combining ecologists, pharmacologists, chemists, ethnobotanists, and policy experts – produce richer results than any single discipline could achieve alone. Long-term funding is essential; the biological and chemical complexity of natural products research means that meaningful results take years to emerge. And ethical engagement with indigenous communities, respecting their intellectual contributions and sovereignty over traditional knowledge, is both a moral requirement and a practical one – those communities hold information about medicinal species that no database yet contains.

The Global Young Academy’s position statement on biodiversity and biomedicine is direct on this point: the increasingly strict regulatory environments governing biodiversity access, while necessary, are creating barriers to collaboration at precisely the moment when biodiversity loss is accelerating. Overcoming these barriers requires intentional institutional design – funding structures, legal frameworks, and research cultures that treat conservation and biomedical discovery as a unified goal rather than separate agendas.

The broader point is straightforward. As Stanford Medicine has observed, more than half the drugs people take today were originally isolated from plants – and we remain reliant on the plants, the farmers who grow them, and the environments that sustain them. That reliance does not disappear because a drug is now synthesised in a laboratory; it simply means the original discovery depended on a living organism that might otherwise have been lost. Every species protected is a potential compound preserved. Every collaboration built between a biomedical researcher and a conservation scientist is an investment in the future of medicine.

What do you think? Given that an estimated important drug candidate is lost every two years alongside species extinction, how should national governments structure funding priorities to ensure biomedical research and biodiversity conservation are genuinely treated as a single policy area rather than separate budget lines? And as indigenous communities hold critical traditional knowledge about medicinal species, what governance frameworks would best protect their intellectual contributions while still enabling scientific research to benefit global public health?

References

1. https://www.cbd.int/article/pharmaceuticals-biodiversity-planet
2. https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp3.10138
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5735771/
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2746688/
5. https://www.cbd.int/doc/case-studies/abs/cs-abs-icbg.pdf
6. https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/21/11/1448
7. https://www.cancer.gov/research/progress/discovery/taxol
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4161504/
9. https://www.kew.org/plants/pacific-yew
10. https://globalyoungacademy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Bio2Bio-Statement-Final.pdf
11. https://stanmed.stanford.edu/building-a-better-drug/