The government of India’s New Millennium Indian Leadership Initiative (NIMITLI) programme in the area of traditional medicine should enable research labs to identify three or four specific herbs to develop herbal drugs for rare and critical diseases. The country is known for its capability in traditional medicine, as herbal drugs have known to produce miraculous cures for the most dreaded diseases. With a wealth of herbal flora, the country’s medical-scientists must make efforts to develop effective drugs with medicinal plants. Currently in India, only 10 per cent of traditional medicine science is genuine and 90 per cent fake.
In his inaugural address at the Indo-Australian Conference on Biotechnology in Medicine being held in Bangalore, Prof G Padmanabhan former director Indian Institute of Science stated under NIMITLI programme, Rs.150 crore has been allocated released through Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) out of which 100 crore was disbursed for 14 core projects involving over 110 R&D institutions and academia along with 45 industrial partners. Herbal drug research is also an important constituent of the project as research is going on at many labs in the country to validate the data in herbal drug discovery.
The former director said that the pharma-biotech scientists in vaccine and molecular diagnostics were making considerable strides. The country had tremendous scope to attain a leadership status in vaccine development. “Vaccines are the cheapest form of saving health of people in the country. With constructive initiatives taken by scientific research institutes like the IISc for the development of recombinant, DNA and rotaviral vaccines along with the pharma-biotech industry, the cost of vaccines have been brought down by 10-fold.”
Multinational pharma companies are not keen to pursue vaccine manufacturing. India has taken the right step to focus on the field and can become a conduit to deliver the end product to a large section of the population, said Prof. Padmanabhan.
In the area of molecular diagnostics the situation has changed dramatically as indigenous diagnostics based on nuclei and DNA have been in the market. “This portrays the prowess of our new breed of Indian science-entrepreneurs who have emerged as a dynamic force in the last five years, he said.
In the area of drugs, he noted that while the pharma-biotech scientists excelled at process development they were not successful in new molecule discovery. Major efforts are on in genomics and studies on mycobacterium for tuberculosis and cancer are on. Ten labs are teaming up four industry partners in research and development, which is changing the R&D scene in the country.
An area that needs focus is nutrition. Efforts are on to improve the quality of protein in crops like tomato, potato and rice to increase the micro-nutrient content. Scientists are working to introduce vitaminised rice and vegetables without increasing cost, so that the food in schools could be nutritious. If the scientists were successful in introducing micro nutrients into crops then the government could provide nourishing mid-day meals combined with compulsory immunization for children in schools.