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LITTLE ROCK — When many people hear the phrase “alternative medicine,” they tend to only focus on the first word. The “medicine” part gets lost among visions of strange, ancient practices or prescriptions that are found outside the world of “modern medicine.”

Cassandra Quave is not one of those people. Currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, she is trying to figure out how to use traditional, herbal cures to fight bacterial infections. And she's having success in a way that may redefine how people think about “medicine.”

“Basically I collect plants, I rip the chemicals out of them and then I test them to see if it does something,” explained Quave (rhymes with “wave”), who holds a Ph.D. in biology from Florida International University, as well as bachelor's degrees in biology and anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta.

When it comes to science, big words are always better, and technically what Quave would be called is either an ethnobotanist or ethnopharmacologist. For the layman, that means she studies how people use plants and what those plants do.

Why plants? Well, here the affable 32-year-old pulls out paper and pen and sheepishly admits she wasn't an art student, but a picture helps illustrate. Sketching a tree, she points to root, bark and leaves. All these come under attack all the time, whether from bacteria, fungi, leaf-eating animals or what have you. Plants, in turn, produce what are called secondary metabolites (“sorry for all the technical terms”). They don't help the plant function as far as growing or producing food, but they do serve to help fight off these attacks.

But what scientists like Quave are finding is that they do other cool stuff, too. Currently her research is focused on a plant called Rubus ulmifolius, or the elm leaf blackberry. It comes from Italy, and what Quave has found is that the secondary metabolites in its root system may help fight off strains of staphylococcus bacteria. Most people might know this nasty critter from the term “staph infection.”

What's interesting, though, is the way in which the chemicals work — and here again Quave goes back to the pen and paper. You know how in Star Trek, the ships have shields that protect them, she explains while drawing a diagram. Well, the bacteria she's fighting have something similar, called a biofilm. It forms around them when they attach to something, and antibiotics can't fight through it. But the chemicals she's working with show promise to keep the bacteria from attaching to anything in the first place, so no biofilm forms and the body is better able to fight off the infection.

“The typical antibiotic will kill bacteria or slow its growth,” she said, adding that resistant bacteria pose a particular problem. “So there's a big call to discover other ways to treat bacteria — by knocking out the bacteria's attack system.”

It is work that is not only important, but personal to Quave. Born with serious birth defects, she's had more than 20 surgeries, including an amputation of her leg. Staph bacteria tends to be a big problem in anybody that gets an implant, whether it’s hip or knee replacement, artificial heart or whatever. So it's a battle she knows. But what's more, resistant staph is responsible for more deaths in this country than AIDS. So there are literally millions of lives that could benefit from her work.

It's not quite the route Quave thought she would take. Until college, she'd planned on med school. She reckoned, with her childhood, she'd be “a badass orthopedic surgeon.” But a simple two-hour class on tropical ecology, which she took as a junior just to get the credits, changed all that. It opened her eyes to the world of traditional medicine. From there she spent three months in Peru, divided between two stays. Later, her work would turn to the Mediterranean.

“Fewer mosquitoes,” she said matter-of-factly.

Largely her field work consists of interviewing locals, especially elders, and finding out what they use to treat different ailments, like skin irritations. Sometimes the answers are surprising — like urinating on a cut to stave off infection. But through careful culling and contrasting and comparing, she ends up with promising leads, plants she'll test to see if they'll do what she hopes they can do.

Through it all, though, she said she maintains the utmost respect for the traditional knowledge she gets. To that extent, she's part of a nonprofit called the Biocultural Diversity Conservancy (again, science likes long names). The organization encourages reciprocity: Medical advances that come out of traditional medicines — for example, a treatment that could be monetized — should result in resources returning to their place of origin. So Quave wrote a book compiling much of what she learned in Italy — “a cookbook for medicinal plant applications” for the community she worked in. It was penned in English and Italian.

“The idea is that we encourage the conservation of nature ... and of these traditions,” she said.

Working with plants isn't always easy. When a new synthetic drug is developed, it's usually built on a specific compound to do one specific thing. But plants may have several different compounds that only work when they're all together or some certain combination. So narrowing things down requires factoring in more variables. But Quave is pleased with what she's seen in the elm leaf blackberry. With a company formed last month — Phytotek LLC — the hope is to move forward in the process that will take them to clinical trials.

And the results? Well, time will tell.

“We have something here that's been used for hundreds of years,” she said, “and it may save the lives of millions of people.”

That, she argues, would be quite an alternative.