Medicinal Plant Name Index and Information Services

The project will facilitate research and lead to more effective health care by providing an authoritative index to scientific plant names mapped to frequently used vernacular, trade and pharmacopoeia names, information on use and other resources. We are developing a range of other information ‘services’ specifically tailored to the needs of particular audiences.

Chinese trader weighing heartwood of the expensive Chinese medicine 'Chen Xiang' from Aquilaria sinensis. Photo: A. McRobb

There is enormous and growing interest in the use of plants and plant extracts in health care. In Western Europe revenues for plant-based medicinal products exceed 5 billion US$.

Most medicinal plants typically have between 5 and 40 different scientific Latin names, thus Health regulators, Industry and workers in health care (e.g. the National Poisons Network) and pharmacological research face a significant obstacle in knowing which names to use and how to use them. Researchers and regulators need to be able to refer accurately and unambiguously to a particular plant and to find all information recorded for that plant regardless of which name was used in publications.

No reference source, which can claim to be authoritative or complete, is currently available to fulfil the needs of the medicinal plant research and health communities. Health regulations are published with meaningless or ambiguous names. The pharmaceutical industry suffers hidden costs, duplication of effort, poorly directed investment and lost opportunities through a failure to share knowledge about plants effectively.

Building upon existing plant name resources at Kew (IPNI and World Checklist projects) we are building a Medicinal Plant Names Index (MPNI): a comprehensive information resource to improve the accuracy of information being gathered about species by those involved in R&D, pharmacovigilance and regulation of human medicinal plants and functional foods. This tool will raise the standard of medicinal plant research, management and use through enabling collation of relevant pharmacological, phytochemical and natural product data irrespective of the plant name or synonym used.

The MPNI will facilitate research and lead to more effective health care by providing an authoritative ontology covering 1.6 million scientific plant names mapped to frequently used vernacular, trade and pharmacopoeia names, information on use and other resources. It will enable:

• effective information retrieval from disparate publications;
• interoperability and links between existing resources;
• organisations holding long lists of plant names to validate these and reduce their maintenance costs.

MPNI will further support global, industry-wide medicinal data standards.

MPNI will be accessed freely over the internet, and we are developing a range of other information ‘services’ specifically tailored to the needs of particular audiences. A user group with representatives from these communities is assisting us in the design of the MPNI and of the associated services to ensure its long-term sustainability.

The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust and officially began on 1 October 2011.