Biodiversity and Drug Discovery: Why We're Losing One Important Medicine Every Two Years
Are we losing potential life-saving medicines to extinction?
Yes. Scientists estimate we’re losing at least one important drug every two years due to biodiversity loss and species extinction. This alarming rate of loss threatens our ability to discover new treatments for cancer, infectious diseases, and other conditions that depend on nature’s vast chemical library.
Evolution has spent three billion years perfecting the molecular compounds found in plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. These natural products have been honed by countless generations of trial and error, creating the most sophisticated chemical laboratory on Earth. When species disappear, we lose access to these irreplaceable molecular blueprints forever.