Adding a new dimension to the industry-institutional cooperation in drug research, Mumbai based Ipca Laboratories Ltd has decided to acquire exclusive rights over the intellectual strengths of VCP Cancer Research Foundation, a government recognized Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (SIRO).
VCPCRF is promoting research on metal-based formulations to develop the treatment and control of various forms of cancer, chronic inflammatory and immunological disorders. It return to the exclusive rights granted, Ipca would fund the entire research activities of the foundation in future.
The significance of the agreement lies in the long-term commitment made by the company to support the research activities without expecting any immediate commercial gain. Ipca is perhaps the first Indian pharmaceutical company to have decided to develop a new division for therapeutic ayurveda to develop indigenous, cost effective life saving medicines. Even established ayurvedic pharma majors have more of OTC / health supplement drugs and cosmetics in their ayurveda stable.
While the foundation is known to have successfully treated hundreds of patients suffering from life threatening diseases using their ayurvedic formulations, it is yet to have fully developed treatment protocol for all these diseases. The Ipca relationship is expected to help VCPCRF tide over all practical difficulties, including financial and human resource crunch, and expand its clinical research activities to come out with concrete protocols for every treatment.
The Ipca-VCPCRF would also attempt to give pharmacological explanation for the therapeutic value of the drug and try to come out with modern life saving medicines. The company is yet to decide upon the total funds to be allotted for the purpose. Ipca is to transplant the entire research activities currently undertaken at VCPCRF to newly constructed facility in due course. The company is to recruit ayurvedic practicioners and scientists to build up a strong tream of resear-chers in the coming days. The founder of VCPCRF Vaidya Balendu Prakash would become part of Ipca as an equity-holding director and would head the Ipca's "ayurvedic division", it is learnt.
Vaidya Balendu, the master brain behind the entire research activities, has been so positive that he feels that his decade long single handed efforts can now be continued with more vigour, thereby developing "2000% more effective drugs" from the ayurvedic formulations that he is using for treatment today.
VCPCRF was set up in 1988 in memory of Vaidya Chandra Prakash, the father of Vaidya Balendu, who made an accidental discovery of a formula for the successful treatment of cancer in 1960s. The attempts of Vaidya Balendu, a qualified ayurvedic practitioner, were to advance this knowledge and make it in tune with the modern scientific requirement. The decision to handover the traditional knowledge passed on to him by his father to the corporate sector has come after years of futile attempt to involve the governmental research agencies to work on his ayurvedic formulations.
The corporate support that has come now thus gives him fresh hopes to pursue his dreams and continue the research until cost effective medicines for treatment of life threatening illness can be developed.