Cedarville University pharmacy professor Denise Simpson is investigating whether plants — including those in the Glen Helen and Clifton Gorge nature preserves — could hold the answer to new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

Simpson is in the beginning stages of a research project at her laboratory inside Cedarville’s new Health Sciences Center, where this week she was examining the toxicity of certain chemicals in plants using Sea-Monkeys brine shrimp roughly the size of a pinhead. By collecting plants in Ohio and testing them in her lab, she hopes to determine what substances in them is effective and how it can be used to treat more people.

Simpson said she has been researching the healing capabilities of plants since 1999 when she was in graduate school in Jamaica.

“Growing up in Jamaica, we use a lot of herbal medicine,” Simpson said, adding she found people there prefer herbal treatments over pills prescribed by a doctor. “I wanted to know if the whole herbal medicine was real or just a placebo effect.”

In her research, she said she has found the effect is real.

“We have a lot of anti-cancer compounds in the clinics from plants,” she said.

Several plants in Ohio haven’t been researched, she said, and others that have not been examined in-depth. Simpson is working on the project with other pharmacy faculty members at Cedarville University, including Rocco Rotello and Elisha Injeti.

She also hopes to also collaborate with colleagues at Central State University and eventually secure a grant for her research.

“If you take a look at all currently marketed drugs in the clinic right now, more than 50 percent of them have natural product backgrounds,” Simpson said. “They’re either natural products themselves or they’re derived from natural products, and so natural products are very important for developing and discovering drugs to treat several disease conditions.”