The Global Research Alliance (GRA), a group of nine leading research institutions including Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India has joined hands with the World Bank (WB) to strengthen the collaborative projects linking modern science with traditional healing practices. The GRA is to encourage scientific validation of medicines and treatment methods that are part of traditional knowledge for global acceptance. The GRA leaders and the WB representatives who met here recently decided to identify priority segments to focus their collaborative research programmes.

Informing this to Pharmabiz.com, Dr R Biesenbach of GRA Nerve Centre said that the fusion of traditional knowledge and modern scientific system would help enrich the development process. The attempt is to device a process where one can really demonstrate the scientific basis of the curative merits of traditional medicines. Such a validation can bring about a surge in the acceptance level of such medicines all over the world, he opined.

According to WB representatives, the institution has been promoting traditional knowledge since 1998. The development challenges posed by the Millennium Development Goals can be met only through a proper integration of all systems of healthcare, they felt. The GRA hopes to have a concrete action plan in place within a year.

The programme involves collaboration of all member organisations in areas like development of validation processes, knowledge sharing platform and virtual coordination structure. While the knowledge sharing platform for the community of practice (scientists and traditional healers) will help them share and learn more, the virtual coordination structure would call for institutional arrangements for self organising the community of practice to coordinate the implementation of the road map for collaborative validation. The alliance thus seeks to develop unique and exciting locale-specific solutions to global problems through a technology fusion. The GRA is an alliance of Battelle Memorial Institute USA, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, Danish Technological Institute, Netherlands, SIRIM-Berhad, Malaysia, Technical Research Centre of Finland, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa and CSIR, India.