Sir: Twenty years ago, four everyday plants—Piper guineense, Eugenia caryophyllata, Pterocarpus osun and Sorghum bicolor—were turned by Nigerian scientists into Niprisan, the world’s first FDA-orphan-designated sickle cell phytodrug, proving that the nation’s forests are a bona fide pharmaceutical pipeline.

The underlying knowledge of Nigeria’s medicinal plants is marooned in thousands of unlinked sources. Nigeria holds roughly 7,895 documented plant species and has generated more than 33,000 medicinal plant papers since 2009, but researchers still have no single, searchable database to see which compound has already been isolated or tested.

A recent informatics study bluntly concluded that “the absence of a centralised digital data repository on medicinal plants and their uses in Nigeria hampers standardisation and scientific validation.”

The global herbal medicine market has already crossed $214 billion and is growing at almost 10  per cent per year; every month Nigeria spends scarce foreign exchange importing phytopharmaceuticals that could have been developed locally if data were better organised.

A government backed, open-access repository—built by linking existing assets such as the ACEPRD Medicinal Plant Repository and the Nigerian Herbal Pharmacopoeia—would slash duplication, accelerate patentable discoveries and give regulators a live dashboard of what is entering the marketplace.

With deforestation and counterfeit remedies on the rise, a validated database would also flag toxic species, dangerous drug–herb interactions and conservation status in real time, protecting patients while preserving biodiversity.

From forest to pharma, the missing link is no longer scientific know-how—it is structured, shareable data.

Damilare Desmond Adebowale wrote from the United States.