Setting up shop as a botanical research laboratory in the Amazon is no mean feat. The tropical city of Iquitos, with over half a million people in the middle of the Amazon basin, has many amenities, but internet bandwidth and state-of-the-art analytical labs are not among them. Putting together the right equipment, operators, and permissions is a jungle. Our years of networking with people and agencies oftentimes siloed in proprietary departments or otherwise obscure, have enabled us to establish a clear path forward for our bioprospecting research. 

Sending lab work out to Lima or beyond, the ordinary way of doing things now, is costly and time-consuming. We have woven together the pieces of an effective analytical supply chain and are (as of August 2021) ready to begin our botanical survey work in earnest, with our first clients lined up. We help our clients and partners move their ideas and needs into a scope of work and project proposal, build a development budget, and bring the right team of experts on board. We assist with intellectual property and export chain of custody, guiding from inception to export. And we do it all with the highest bioethical standards.

As we build an endowment for the Schultes Center and develop its commercial counterpart, Pharmazonia, we aim always to add value to each link of our product development chain, from sustainable harvest and harvester training to the highest possible laboratory standards, to our innovative pay-it-forward investment in education program.  Our motto of “Investigacion y Integracion” (Research and Integration) indicates that we approach our work as an intellectual and economic ecosystem, valuing the parts and the whole, the plants, people, and environment that connect us all.

While the initial projects and species we are working with remain confidential with our particular clients, we also look toward publishing results in the appropriate journals and online here on our website as appropriate. We don’t believe in plant patents, but we appreciate the sunk costs that can go into research and development and respect the values of our client relationships. 

Ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, the starting points for our work, offer from folk knowledge and the personal research of particular curanderos the substantive “clues” from which we begin. Gathering and synthesizing this informal information and a thorough scientific literature search together provide our bioprospecting platform, from anthropology to biochemistry. It really is an excellent mosaic of data, like looking down on the immense Amazon system from above, fine green details outlining trends, the unseen supporting and defining the sinuous flow of knowledge.

We want to think that the late great Richard Evans Schultes looks down favorably upon our work, which to a great extent has gone beyond his and others’ encounters and familiarization with indigenous cultures to a modern scientific look into the depths of plant physiology, with a continuous and practical interest in helping humanity while preserving Nature.