A clinical trial this fall at the University of Alberta just may help lead the way to a new multi-million dollar Alberta crop
Think of Siberia. Pause on that thought. What comes to mind? Perhaps Edmonton in winter? Now think of a potential crop, an herb, actually, that really doesn’t mind that climate, in fact, needs it to properly establish itself. Drawing a blank? That’s because you’ve probably never heard of Rhodiola rosea. You can be forgiven for not being aware of this hardy Alberta-grown herb as the first rhodiola harvest in the province only came in last year.
“This plant originates in Siberia and that’s one of the reasons it works so well here,” says Dave Maruszeczka, ’76 BSc(Eng), one of the original group of 20-or-so growers who took the government of Alberta up on its invitation to try growing something a little different on their property. After attending some meetings and signing up for the trial, Maruszeczka picked up the seedlings from Alberta Agriculture — they came from Norway — and began his relationship with rhodiola. And you really can’t call it anything but a close, personal relationship, as Maruszeczka has taken to courting his 12,000 plants so as to entice them to reveal their secrets and disclose their inner lives.
So what is Rhodiola rosea (its second name comes from the fact that the root has a slight rose scent to it)? “Rhodiola rosea,” says Maruszeczka, “is a root crop that needs four years in the ground, maybe five, to acquire enough of the active ingredient called rosavin to be beneficial. Other biological substances contained in the roots are salidroside, rosarin and rosiridin.”
And what benefits do you get from taking the rhodiola that’s available in health food or vitamin and supplement stores in concentrated capsules? Well, there’s an abundance of good things attributed to the herb that include increased physical endurance; longevity; resistance to high altitude sickness; and treatment of fatigue, depression, anemia, impotence, gastrointestinal ailments, infections and nervous system disorders.
This is not to say that Maruszeczka, the other Alberta Rhodiola Rosea Growers Organization (ARRGO) members, or the government of Alberta endorse all of these purported attributes of rhodiola. Specifically, they’d be happy if the plant — from a class of plants known as “adaptogens” — was officially recognized as helping the body adapt to stress while strengthening the immune, nervous and glandular systems; increasing resistance to fatigue; and improving cognitive and memory function. That’s still a pretty long shopping list but one that Maruszeczka is willing to back up with personal experience.
“I should have been taking it years ago,” says Maruszeczka, who only began taking his own product following an ARRGO meeting. Maruszeczka, a retired engineer, is one of the organization’s nine directors as well as the de facto project lead on a new facility being readied near Thorsby to process the herb. It was Susan Lutz, ’94 PhD, provincial senior development officer at Agricultural and Rural Development (“she’s known by us growers as ‘the mother of rhodiola’”), who suggested to him at the ARRGO meeting that, if he was growing it, he should be using it.
“I’ve been taking it for about a year now,” he says. “The big thing is energy. In fact, people with fast metabolisms shouldn’t take it before going to bed because they’ll be up all night trying to figure out what to do with themselves. My short-term memory over time has also improved dramatically. I used to go into town and meet some of my neighbours that I see fairly regularly, and I couldn’t remember their names. So I started taking this stuff, and I’d say about a month or two later my memory started to improve.”
ARRGO members have commissioned clinical trials of their own to support their claims that rhodiola can ease stress-induced fatigue (a claim that’s been made for centuries — the Russians even give it to their Olympians and cosmonauts — but still has to be clinically proven if it’s to be marketed as having such benefits). The majority of the funding for this study came from AVAC Ltd., a not-for-profit Alberta company that invests in research initiatives and early-stage commercial businesses. The provincial government and industry players — such as members of ARRGO — kicked in other monies. The fact that ARRGO members put their own money down on rhodiola’s future was not lost on Lutz, who really got behind the rhodiola rush at that point.
The light first went on for Lutz in Anaheim, California, while she was listening to talks at the Natural Products Expo West that annually attracts about 50,000 members of the natural health products industry. She had only peripherally scanned the proposal for the commercialization of rhodiola that had landed on her desk in 2003. But at the conference in California the word “rhodiola” was on the lips of just about every presenter having anything to do with natural health products, leading Lutz to think she should look a little closer at the proposal sitting on her desk back in Edmonton.
“Everybody knows about echinacea, for example,” says Lutz about rhodiola’s potential. “Industry experts believe that Rhodiola rosea could one day be in the top 10 of medicinal herbs, if only someone could learn to cultivate it. As far as we can see, rhodiola has the potential to be an $80-million plant in North America, and we can’t think of any reason why Alberta can’t eventually capture 25 percent of that market.”
To help capture that market — as well as lend scientific street cred to the herb’s efficacy — there’s a clinical trial planned for this fall using U of A nursing-student subjects titled: ”Rhodiola rosea for mental and physical fatigue in nurses.” For six weeks, half of the subjects will be given a daily dose of between 425-to-850 mg of the real McCoy while the other half will be given a placebo. The primary objective of the trial is to assess whether rhodiola improves the quality of life for nurses involved in shift work.
“The University of Alberta is front-and-centre in rhodiola research,” says Sunita Vohra, professor in the Department of Pediatrics and director of the Complementary and Alternative Research and Education (CARE) program. “Raimar Loebenberg — a professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences — has been a key player in the rhodiola product development. And Larissa Shamseer — a U of A grad student and part of my CARE research program — led the review of Rhodiola rosea and coordinated the development of the clinical trial.”
“We make capsules out of the extract,” says Loebenberg, who created the U of A Drug Development and Innovation Centre. This new facility will focus on stage-one development of pharmaceuticals, meaning researchers there will develop products for prototyping studies, next-stage clinical trials and eventual regulatory approval. “If somebody has an idea, we can get the clinical trial materials developed here and tested in the clinics,” says Loebenberg. “We put the puzzle together. In that way, we developed the rhodiola extraction method and provided the placebos. Without that the rhodiola study would not be possible.”
“The U of A Faculty of Nursing has also been a key player,” adds Vohra. “So from my end this rhodiola study involves four U of A faculties: pharmacy, medicine, nursing and the school of public health.” Add in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences (plus engineering, as represented by Maruszeczka), and that brings the total to six U of A faculties all investigating ways to get the most out of rhodiola.
One thing that’s already known for certain is that the tolerance of the herb for Alberta growing conditions is a match made in heaven. The surface-germinating seeds are as small as dust, so there’s no way they can be put on the ground and left to germinate without most of them just disappearing. So the seeds are germinated in soil-filled trays that have been covered with plastic. During late winter the trays are placed outside in the cold because they need a month or so of frost. “Basically you seed the tray and put it outside in the snow,” says Maruszeczka. “The thing’s gotta see the cold. The seed’s hard shell needs the cold to crack it.”
Once you plant the seedlings in the ground you water them in once and walk away. Maruszeczka planted his first crop just prior to the drought of 2003 that parched his acreage near the town of Ryley, AB. “I thought I was going to lose them all,” he says, “because our philosophy was not to baby them but to see if they’d stand up like a field crop. What happened is that they survived quite well. And based on the results of those first trials, we basically determined that this was the shining star.”
There are now over 100 rhodiola growers in the province. “We’ve got a couple of growers who have 60,000 plants on about 4.5 hectares,” says Maruszeczka, whose own plot is home to a lot of dandelions. “But they also run a market garden business and so have the people on hand to look after the plants. I’d hire people out here, but where am I going to get them? You won’t find a high school student who will even look twice at you.”
For Maruszeczka, who grew up on a farm about 30 kilometres east of his current location, growing a lot is much less important than finding out how to grow it best. “I’m not in it for the money,” he says. “I’m looking for information that I can pass on to everyone else.” Maruszeczka wants to be the man behind the curtain who helps to bring about Lutz’s vision of eventually growing a new all-Alberta crop on a commercial scale that can go right from the field to the medicine cabinet with minimal fuss, bother or maintenance in between.
What the price will be when commercial-scale Alberta rhodiola hits the world market nobody knows. Checking at a vitamin and supplements store revealed a price for 60 capsules (two different brands) of $27.50 for the 500 mg ones and $16.99 for the 250 mg. But there is a market out there for the herb. Germany recently expressed an interest in buying five tonnes of Alberta’s crop when that much is available.
“In the longer term we’re going after a natural health product,” says Maruszeczka, as rain clouds gather behind him that may provide some much-needed moisture to the dry earth on this late June day. If so, it will be only the second shower he’s seen all summer. “We’re not there yet. But we’re close. Mark my words, based on all the things we’ve learned, rhodiola is going to be a word in people’s minds in years to come.”
— Kim Green
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