Jaguar Health and Napo Pharmaceuticals Collaborate on New Drug Crofelemer
Jaguar Health and family company Napo Pharmaceuticals highlighted how the Company's long-standing research in ethnobotanical medicine, sustainable harvesting, and regulatory drug development under botanical guidance continues to inform the development of crofelemer as a novel oral adjunctive therapy to PS for rare congenital gastrointestinal intestinal failure disorders, including microvillus inclusion disease and short bowel syndrome. The company said, "It has been through direct research collaboration with indigenous experts on plant and ethnobotanical medicine that Napo team members learned about the use of extracts of Croton lechleri to treat a number of gastrointestinal conditions. We have had cross-cultural medical discussions with traditional healers - a methodology that provides an opportunity to elucidate new ways of treating unmet medical needs such as IF. Napo has been collaborating on the long term sustainable harvest of Croton lechleri in the Central and Northern Peruvian Amazon for several decades, and this is being done with 19 distinct indigenous cultural groups in more than 30 locations. Crofelemer is a refined and highly characterized botanical drug substance consisting of a complex oligomeric proanthocyanidin mixture derived from the latex of the Croton lechleri tree. Crofelemer is distinct from the raw traditional preparation and is the first and only oral botanical drug approved by the FDA. It was developed and approved as a delayed-release tablet through botanical identification, controlled sustainable harvesting, chemical characterization, biological testing, and clinical development."
