With a view to enhancing the rate of herbal drug discovery by tapping into the huge potential in the area traditional practices, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) is planning to scientifically evaluate at least 800 selected outstanding practices in the next few years.

The ICMR has already tied up with the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) which is engaged in the scouting of traditional practices and grassroots innovations. NIF has a database of approximately 80,000 traditional herbal practices from over 540 districts.

The necessary funding has been approved for evaluating 800 practices during the current 12th Five Year Plan as the present century is going to be that of herbal drug discovery. The plan is to include outstanding traditional practices which can be validated through the research efforts of the individual researchers engaged in validating exercise in national laboratories as well as in various universities in the country, sources said.

In order to reduce the cost of discovering leads ICMR felt that it can enter into a long term collaboration with organizations like NIF. It has been noticed that sometimes traditional knowledge holders develop successful health solutions, which many times are not optimal. Thus, ICMR noticed that there is a gap between the world's formal and informal knowledge production systems.

“In order to set the agenda, coordination and arrangements of formal scientific institutions and adequate resources are required to add value to or scale-up local knowledge after blending it with modern scientific technologies,” sources said.

ICMR entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with NIF for a period of five years in 2006. A task force discussed the plan and formulated the structure of the proposal to be submitted to ICMR so that scientific validation and value addition in traditional knowledge can help solve many day-to-day problems of people. Under the scheme, value will be added by ICMR Labs and other scientific institutions recognized by it to outstanding traditional herbal knowledge and innovations to generate useful leads and share the benefits. The promising leads among the non-codified herbal practices will be developed as marketable products.

The MoU was further extended and is operative till June 23, 2016. Under ICMR- NIF collaboration evaluation of anti typhoid and anti-diarrhoeal activities of medicinal plants claimed by traditional healers have been undertaken.