Professor Geoff Abbott is a botanical Indiana Jones. He leads expeditions into Earth’s wild places to find medicinal treasures – herbal remedies used by indigenous peoples that may contain life-saving chemicals that will revolutionise treatments for serious disorders.
These expeditions take Geoff Abbott, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), into wildernesses within the Mojave desert and Yosemite National Park in the US, as well as Hawaii, the Virgin Islands and along the Pacific coast of Canada – all far from Norfolk, where he was raised.
‘These are places where you need satellite phones and a survival kit, they’re that remote,’ he told Good Health.
Back in his lab, Professor Abbott also examines how staples such as rosemary, thyme, coriander, lavender and chamomile may treat conditions as diverse as epilepsy, high blood pressure, infections – even drug addiction.
Herbal treatments have often been dismissed by sceptics as having no more scientific underpinning than witchcraft and spell-weaving.
‘These are places where you need satellite phones and a survival kit, they’re that remote,’ Professor Geoff Abbott told Good Health
But at his laboratory at UCI, Professor Abbott and his team are using cutting-edge science to reveal medicinal herbs’ powers.
In particular, they explore how chemicals in traditionally used herbs may cure serious conditions by repairing faults in the microscopic electrical switches that permeate our bodies.
These electrical switches are called ion channels. They sit in the outer membranes of protein cells found throughout the human body and determine the strength of the electrical charges inside them. The level of this charge, in turn, determines how the proteins operate.
The proteins themselves play essential roles in regulating the electrical signals that enable our nervous system and organs such as the brain, heart and muscles to function.
Ion-channel switches allow ions (atoms with an electrical charge) to enter protein cells whenever it is necessary to charge them. The level of charge inside the proteins determines how strongly the proteins interact with other elements of the nervous system.
What makes the bite of some spiders, scorpions or snakes so dangerous is that the venom can interfere with their victims’ ion channels to shut down their nervous system.
Similarly, if ion-channel switches go awry, becoming overactive or underactive, they can cause a range of illnesses such as epilepsy, high blood pressure and even, it seems, drug addiction.
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones
Professor Abbott’s work shows that chemicals in common herbs can repair ion switches’ that are malfunctioning for whatever reason – whether genetic faults, injury, illness or poisoning.
Some can make underactive ion switches function properly again; others turn down overactive switches.
‘We have got 2,000 botanical extracts that we are screening,’ says Professor Abbott.
Some well-known plants are showing promise. For example, a study by his lab reported in the journal FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) found coriander contains a chemical, dodecanal, that may reduce epilepsy seizures. Dodecanol alters ion channels in brain cells to make them less excitable – epileptic seizures can occur as a result of excess brain cell excitability.
Coriander has been used for centuries in folk medicine in South-East Asia and North Africa to reduce seizures. It was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. But until this publication, no one knew scientifically how coriander worked in epilepsy.
Professor Abbott says: ‘This discovery may lead to more effective use of coriander as an anticonvulsant, or to modifications of dodecanol to develop more effective anticonvulsant drugs.’
His research is often inspired by indigenous people’s continuing use of medicinal herbs.
Recently his team has been working with the Kwakwaka’wakw people, who live on the Pacific coast of Canada, to pinpoint the molecular mechanism that underlies their use of three different plants – stinging nettle, bladderwrack kelp and Pacific ninebark – to treat ataxia (a group of neurological disorders that affect balance, coordination and speech).
At least 10,000 adults and 500 children in the UK have some form of it, according to the charity Ataxia UK.
Professor Abbott’s team found two compounds in the plants – tannic and gallic acids – that can repair faulty ion channels in nerve proteins that cause symptoms.
‘These are the first plant compounds known to do this – no synthetic ones can,’ says Professor Abbott. ‘You can’t swallow tannic acid, it would make you sick. But you can rub it into the skin. Gallic acid is of more interest because it is already available over the counter in supplements such as bladderwrack kelp. Studies of toxicity show it to be safe.’
It’s not clear why the Kwakwaka’wakw people needed an ataxia remedy, ‘but it may have been because ataxia can be caused by infections’, says Professor Abbott.
‘They may also have suffered it from taking hallucinogenic plants revered in indigenous medicine and shamanism, but which can cause ataxia if overdosed.’
Meanwhile, rosemary is showing promise as a treatment for cocaine addiction. It contains carnosic acid – already known to open ion channels in the brain.
Professor Abbott explains: ‘A colleague mentioned that he had found that these same brain ion channels were closed down in lab mice addicted to cocaine.’
So Professor Abbott set up an experiment where mice could press down on a pair of bars to get a drink – one drink was dosed with cocaine, the other not.
‘The mice promptly learnt to press the cocaine drink bar because it is more pleasurable.’
But when the mice were dosed with carnosic acid, they stopped choosing the cocaine bar, according to results published recently in the journal Neuron.
Why would this work? One theory, says Professor Abbott, is that the acid frees up memory formation in cocaine addicts whose memory is otherwise hard-wired to obsessionally crave the drug.
Rosemary has long been renowned for enhancing memory. ‘There’s evidence to suggest it’s worthwhile trying rosemary extract to improve memory-test results,’ says Professor Abbott.
‘You can buy carnosic acid as a supplement. It crosses the body’s blood-brain barrier [which keeps out chemicals and infections] so it can indeed affect brain cells.’
Thyme also shows promise, as a therapy against fungal infections that are becoming increasingly resistant to conventional drugs.
Professor Abbott says: ‘Thyme has been used historically as a fungicide, but no one knew how it might work. Then we discovered a small molecule in it that blocks an ion channel in candida fungal infections [e.g. thrush]. Candida fungi only have one of these ion channels, so it is very important to them to stay alive.’
Candida fungi usually live harmlessly on skin and in the mouth, throat, gut and vagina. But they can cause infection if they grow out of control or get deep into the body. ‘Our tests show a small molecule from thyme effectively stops candida albicans, the most common type,’ says Professor Abbott.
This is particularly timely as candida strains are increasingly developing resistance to conventional anti-fungal drugs.
One newly emerging drug-resistant strain, Candida auris, was first identified in Japan in 2009. The pathogen has since spread to more than 40 countries, killing 30 to 60 per cent of infected people.
In 2017, an outbreak at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust affected 70 patients. It took two-and-a-half years to clear the hospital of the infection.
Humans and fungi share significant amounts of DNA – making it hard to invent anti-fungal drugs that kill the fungi without harming human tissues, warn experts.
However, Professor Abbot says: ‘The ion channel that the thyme molecule affects is not found in mammals. This means that you can use it safely to kill candida infections without side-effects.’
Now his team hopes to develop a synthetic and more potent version of the thyme molecule.
But while they are drilling down to discover the molecular mechanisms in herbs that can be therapeutic, ‘in reality it may sometimes be better to use the whole plants’, says Professor Abbott. ‘Our research often suggests there may be other chemicals in the plants that work together with the ones we’ve found to make the botanical therapies more effective.’
So raid the larder and, as the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates put it: ‘Make food your medicine.’
