The Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), the leading NGO in the country to promote local health traditions and drug research, is setting up an advanced Rs.15 crore Centre for Excellence with funding from United Nations, Ford Foundation and Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), the Denmark Government's bilateral funding arm for developing countries.

Revealing this to Pharmabiz.com, Dr. G.G.Gangadharan, joint director, FRLHT said the five-year project was envisaged to bring in the essential quality assurance and drug standardization face for Indian Systems of Medicine. The project would have three main components - a futuristic world class R&D lab to develop protocols for herbal drug standardization and research, a 100-bedded hospital for clinical treatment and validation, and a special R &D package kit for the industry SMEs to standardize herbal raw materials. The facility would come up within the FRLHT headquarters at Attur, near Bangalore.

He said the laboratory would develop various protocols for testing and standardization procedures of herbal medicines and formulations based on the principles, concepts and categories of Indian Systems of Medicine, combining traditional knowledge with modern concepts and tools. Already FRLHT has a world standard Laboratory for Medicinal Plants, envisaged as a central facility for NGOs, small scale manufacturers of herbal medicines, traders, academicians, researchers, students and export organizations for quality testing of raw drugs or compounded herbal medicines. The idea was to integrate and upgrade the lab with Centre of Excellence, for which Rs.5 crore each investment has been earmarked on equipments, infrastructure and working capital, said Dr. G.G.Gangadharan.

The 100-bedded hospital, starting as a specialty centre for Ayurveda, will be an integrated facility of Centre of Excellence for treatment, promotion, preventive measures, research, pharmacy and training. The hospital will focus on five key curative aspects of cardiac, neurological, skin, diabetes and musculo-skeletal diseases, besides a special preventive programme involving various communities. At a later stage, the hospital would house other systems of Indian medicine and local healing traditions, said the Joint Director.

He said FRLHT was in the process of developing a user-friendly R&D kit for herbal drug raw material quality assurance, as part of the project. With high precision ability to identify the TLC profile of herbs under scrutiny to assure the quality of raw materials, the kit would be priced at a low Rs.3000 to Rs.3500/ package. "As out of the 8000 odd herbal drug makers in India, more than 7800 are in the small and medium scale segment, and most of them lack proper scientific system for quality assurance at the raw material stage. So we are focusing on their needs and will price the R&D kit below Rs.3,500" said Dr. G.Gangadharan, who said FRLHT would provide the necessary training for the users of this easy to operate R&D system.