Alain Li Wan Po, is the moderator of this website. His books include Non-Prescription Drugs, Dictionary of Evidence-Based Medicine, Statistics for Pharmacists, and Genomic Medicine 101.
He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics for over three decades.
He has reviewed for major journals including the Lancet, The British Medical Journal, and Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
Alain is a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and an honorary Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal National Academy of Pharmacy and of the Academy of Pharmacy of Castille and León
Alain has served as a member of the UK Committee on Safety of Medicines and as pharmacogenomics lead at the UK National Genetics and Genomics Education Centre until its merger with Health Education England. He has acted as consultant for companies including, Astra Zenecca, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, and Roche.
He has held chairs at the Queen’s University of Belfast, the University of Nottingham and the University of Aston. He has been external examiner at the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Geneva, Liverpool, London, Malaya, Manchester, Reading, Robert Gordon, Singapore, Strathclyde, Utrecht, and Zimbabwe, The Chinese University of Hong-Kong, and The University of Tasmania, within departments of pharmacy, nutrition, and medicine.
Alain also holds several degrees including Arts, Applied mathematics and statistics, and Economics and mathematical sciences. He has a MA in Creative Writing.
He has written over 100 papers and is a fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. He has also held the fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry, The Royal Statistical Society and the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland. His current research interests focus on genomic and translational medicine. He is currently working on two books.
He moderates a Facebook Group MedicineTrees focussing on medicines derived from plants
https://www.facebook.com/groups/582447310461173)
The idea for this MedicineTrees website came to me during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a disease against which we had no known treatment. We appeared then to have gone back to ancient times when new diseases descended on us from foreign lands as punitive acts of God. Our modern formularies were found wanting against the new virus and there was a frantic search for possible treatments.
Our orthodox drug developers started systematic screening of drugs from our extensive formularies of antiviral and antimicrobial drugs while our biopharmaceutical engineers focussed on novel vaccines and antibodies. Others, as of old, were convinced that the plant world would yield effective remedies. Indeed, plants, and I include mushrooms among them, have given us some of the most effective drugs that we have today – the antimalarial artemisinin from sweet wormwood, antibiotics and immunosuppressants from moulds, the anticancer drug paclitaxel from the yew tree, and the anti-cholesterol statins from mushrooms. Those stories, some dating back to ancient times and others to the age of European exploration of Africa, Asia and the Americas, deserve retelling as a way of saying thank you to the natural world and to remind us of its importance.
While confined at home during the pandemic, I rekindled a love of gardening and was able to observe plants closer than I had ever done, almost as if they were individuals. Each plant and indeed each bud, flower, or fruit brought forth a new sense of wonder that our best poets, including Tennyson and Wordsworth, have captured so well. I began photographing them to share with friends. I hope that through photographs, videos, short pieces of writing, we at Medicine Trees would be able to enthuse each other about the wonder of medicinal plants.
Medicine Trees 