What continues to stand out is how naturally systems thinking & complexity science is converging with the way many of us have long understood plant medicine: not as single compounds acting on single targets, but as dynamic, multi-layered systems interacting across levels.
As an example, Olaf Kelber at Bayer Consumer Health, spoke on natural products as multi-drug, multi-target therapeutics.
What felt particularly significant wasn’t just the acknowledgment of this paradigm; but the push toward actually quantifying it.
➡️We’re watching a shift from reductionist validation → toward systems-level accountability.
➡️How do you ensure quality when efficacy isn’t tied to a single marker compound, but to an emergent network of interactions?
➡️How do you standardize something that is inherently complex without stripping away the very intelligence that makes it effective?
ICSB this year has made one thing clear: the future of natural products won’t be about simplifying plants to fit our models:
It will be about evolving our models to meet the complexity of plants.
Grateful to be in rooms where that conversation is not only happening, but accelerating.
Day 4 at ICSB—Meeting the Complexity of Plants
