The government funded digitisation and decoding work of ancient palm leaves and manuscripts of Ayurveda medicines carried out by the Thiruvananthapuram based herbal drug research organisation, Traditional Knowledge Innovation Kerala (TKIK) will be submitted to the Kerala Ayush cluster – Care-Keralam-  on Monday, January 12 for scientific validation studies.

With Care-Keralam’s undertaking of the project, the decade old innovation and research work of the TKIK will find result in contributing unknown information on drug development and disease management in the Ayurveda system, said Dr R Manoj, scientific officer at the TKIK.

The undertaking ceremony will be in the form an MoU signing between Care-Keralam and TKIK, and it will be held in the presence of the Union Ayush minister, Shripad Yesso Naik and state health minister, VS. Sivakumar, at Thiruvananthapuram.

While briefing Pharmabiz about the project, Dr Manoj says , “We are engaged in a new mission to help the future generation for sharing the hidden knowledge about traditional medicines. Our institute (TKIK) has sought the help of institutionally trained physicians and litterateurs to read, decode and transliterate the contents in the palm leaves which are considered as the treasure trove of Ayurveda system.”

“We have collected more than two thousand bundles of palm leaf manuscripts from various sources such as indigenous practitioners, gurukulas, houses of old vaidyas and aacharyas. The number of leaves comes around more than 45,000. These leaves have to be properly preserved, otherwise they will completely get ruined, because the maximum life span of the dried leaves is 300 years. We have published a small number of the materials in printed book forms, and the sixth one will  be published on Monday”, he then adds.

The project was started with the financial support of central ayush department ten years ago, but later it stopped funding. Then TKIK approached the state government which gave Rs.1 crore to continue the project, Dr Manoj further says.

Sources from Care-Keralam said they will prepare a dossier (drug master file-DMF) of a combination medicine mentioned in the palm leaves soon with a purpose to register it in foreign countries. Utilising the technical assistance from Care-Keralam, the selected method of drug will be subjected for validation studies.

According to sources, by digitizing and decoding of these ancient manuscripts, plenty of unknown knowledge about Ayurveda formulations and their preparations can be shared to the stakeholders of the system. The manuscripts are written in ancient Malayalam script.

In Tamil Nadu, a Chennai-based Siddha research centre had made an attempt of this kind, to digitize and decode the old manuscripts of Siddha system, two years ago. But with the stoppage of fund from Ayush, the project got stopped later.

The secretary of department of pharmaceuticals (DoP), Dr. V K Subburaju while speaking in a seminar said Tamil Nadu has a very good collection of palm leaf manuscripts of traditional medicines written in ancient Tamil and in Sanskrit and they are kept at the library at Thanjavur  which was established by an old king.