Pilot Program for Recovery of All-Natural Medicinals from Arkansas Forests: A Key to Easing Sagging Profitability in the Forest Industry

This proposal will serve as a pilot project for poor, rural, Southern counties with rich forestry resources. Arkansas and surrounding states have some of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Arkansas 19 million acres of forests represent more than half of the total land mass of this state. This proposal is aimed at developing processing technologies that will add value to existing paper mill waste by extracting high value phytochemicals from forestry tree bark. The development of this technology will eventually result in high paying jobs created in rural communities experiencing economic downturns due to the housing industry collapse. As part of this pilot demonstration project, we will prepare forestry co-products using our proprietary extraction technology and identify the principal phytochemicals. We will use the high-throughput screening techniques we have developed to evaluate the biological activity of these phytochemicals. We will characterize the active ingredients and optimize the extraction, stability and reproducibility of producing phytochemicals with high-levels of biological activity. This Phase I proposal will establish the feasibility of efficiently extracting these phytochemicals and provide a comparison for their activity based on potentially competing commercial products already in the market.