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Unlocking the healing power of nature
Polypharmakos harnesses the largely unexplored therapeutic potential of natural extracts through access to the world’s largest collections of validated plants and fungi, in a way that has never been done before.
We are a joint venture between The University of Cambridge and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, enabling us to draw upon deep institutional scientific knowledge to explore and commercialise the healing power of nature. Our Nutripharma approach spans nutraceutical, functional food, and pharmaceutical sectors.
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Inflammaging
Our first area of focus is inflammaging, and we will be looking at selected plants and fungi from the more than 8.75 million samples at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) to discover which may influence our inflammatory pathways as we age
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Our Vision
A new and relevant discovery platform
The natural world can deliver many therapeutic benefits, but is largely unexplored.
Over 25,000 of the world’s plants have documented medicinal uses, but only about 200 have been incorporated into Western medicine. These therapeutic benefits have been subject to little investigation or characterisation, even though we know the potential held within the natural realm is potentially game-changing.
Our discovery platform will interrogate this resource in a new way, using AI-based machine-learning, underpinned by deep ethnobotanical knowledge held by the scientists at Kew, CABI and Cambridge.
6.2%
of the 347,000 known plant
species are associated with
some form of patent to date
0.4%
of the 2.2 million known
fungi species are associated with
some form of patent to date
≈4,000
new species of plants and
fungi are scientifically
characterised each year
65%
of small molecule drugs
approved for cancer were
derived from natural
products (1981-2019)
25,791
plant species have been
documented to be of
medicinal use
Images courtesy of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
