Previously, I wrote about a traditional medicine that turned out to be a potent anti-HIV drug. I said that I would keep an eye out in New Scientist for more info on it, and I found it yesterday. There's an interview with Paul Alan Cox, the founder and director of the Institute for Ethnomedicine in Hawaii, and in it, he describes finding the drug and the novel approach they're taking to splitting the profits.(link for New Scientist subscribers only)

Thirty per cent of the patent royalties from the NCI go to the village. The AIDS Research Alliance has agreed to give back 20 per cent of any profits it makes, split between the government of Samoa and the village. And the University of California, Berkeley, which is trying to clone the prostratin gene, has agreed to give back 50 per cent of its proceeds; we came up with that scheme because cloning the gene would cut the legs out from under the plant cultivation industry. In addition, the AIDS Research Alliance has agreed to source the drug from plants grown in Samoa.

I think this is an interesting partnership that might encourage more study into traditional cures while also helping the people who have used these cures in lieu of modern drugs. So far the trials of the new drug, called prostratin, have apparently been extremely encouraging.