Inside the Apocynaceae Atlas: drug-discovery research concentrated on a handful of species, with no indexed research on most of the family
Our first family-scale evidence atlas reads the entire dogbane & milkweed family end to end — and finds drug-discovery research concentrated on a handful of species, while 64.5% of species have no indexed research at all.
Our first family-scale evidence atlas reads the entire dogbane & milkweed family — Apocynaceae — end to end. It finds drug-discovery research concentrated on a handful of species, over a family where most species have no indexed research at all.
What we found
- Drug-discovery research that rarely reaches the clinic. 5,501 in-vitro studies against just 386 clinical studies — most of the pipeline stops before human trials.
- Research anti-correlated with extinction risk. The rarest, most threatened species are the least examined; attention flows to the already-studied.
- 64.5% of species have no indexed research. Of the family’s dual-verified species census (GBIF ∩ WCVP), 3,775 of 5,851 species — 64.5% — return no indexed research at all: not “no research exists,” but a measured blank in the global record.
Why it matters
Apocynaceae is a pharmacopoeia — the source of the vinca alkaloids and countless drug leads. A portfolio this concentrated means the next medicine is statistically likelier to sit in a species with no indexed research than in the dozen we keep returning to. The atlas turns that from an anecdote into a map.
How we built it
COMPASS harvested the family’s indexed literature, AI-tagged every study across dozens of structured dimensions — each tag grounded in the paper’s own text and confirmed by an independent AI judge — and geolocated the study sites, where the science was actually done rather than where its authors sit. Accuracy is measured against expert gold sets, not asserted, and every blank on the map is labelled “no indexed research,” never “never studied.”
