Csir Joins Hands With Kerala Ayurvedic Body For New Drugs
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has entered into a landmark agreement with the Kottakkal (Kerala) based Aarya Vaidhya Shala to prospect new drug molecules from traditional ayurvedic medicines.
This will be the first commercial attempt to search for sources of new allopathic drugs from Ayurveda. Previous attempts have been at the laboratory level and successes have been very few.
CSIR director general R A Mashelkar told Business Standard that the collaboration will develop viable bioactive molecules, establish standard procedures and improve processing and preserving techniques applicable to the ayurvedic industry.
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While ayruveda is a respected medical science, its bane is the lack of standardisation and CSIR aims to correct this vital flaw.
AVS, which treats hundreds of thousands of patients relies on medicine production practices dating back to thousands of years. With the CSIRs help, modern scientific inputs will be infused so that the production practices are standardised and the finished products have a longer shelf life than at present.
Various CSIR labs will assist AVS in developing appropriate agrotechnologies for growing of medicinal plants. AVS mainly sources its raw material from forest areas which is subject to various uncertainties and the CSIR technology will help it to access quality input at a consistent pace.
CSIR will screen mutually selected Ayurvedic medicines produced by AVS and subject the most promising among them to intensive laboratory tests to isolate bioactive molecules. Modern medicines will be developed based on these molecules in CSIRs specialist laboratories like the Central Drug Research Laboratory and the National Chemical Laboratory.
A joint implementation committee will work out the technical details of the research areas to be pursued.
The intellectual property generated through the collaborative programme, will be jointly and equally owned by AVS and CSIR, the two organisations.
Patents, if any, resulting from the programme shall be filed in the names of the scientists and idea generators.
The joint research programme will be valid for five years and among the areas of research are medicines relating to anti-ageing, immunology and degenerative diseases, for which AVS is particularly well known.