Ayurveda for drug discovery: scientists hope to bridge gap
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ayurveda-for-drug-discovery-scientists-hope-to-bridge-gap/482137/
Pune scientists Dr Raghunath Mashelkar and
Prof Bhushan Patwardhan hope their article will help create a positive
environment for globalising ayurveda. Their article, 'Traditional
medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery: can Ayurveda show the way
forward?', was published online on Science Direct on Thursday. International
journal Drug Discovery Today (DDT) is also scheduled to publish the paper in
its ensuing issue.
“For long we have been fighting for a
rightful place for ayurveda. The scientific validation of ayurvedic principles
has been close to my heart and hence it is satisfying that a journal like Drug
Discovery Today has accepted our article,” said Dr Mashelkar, a Bhatnagar
fellow at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) and president of the Global
Research Alliance.
The article says ayurveda can offer a
strategy for new drug candidates to facilitate discovery process and also for
the development of synergistic botanical formulations.
Patwardhan, a scientist at the
Inter-disciplinary School of Health Sciences, Universityof Pune,
said five out of six peer reviewers have strongly recommended the article. “We
also consulted many top drug discovery scientists from global universities and
pharmacy multinationals just to ensure that our review does not become
counterproductive.”
Can ayurveda show the way forward? “Great
traditions like ayurveda certainly offer sound rationale, valuable experiential
wisdom and a large database of botanical resources. For several reasons,
researchers involved in the modern drug discovery have started revisiting
ancient traditional knowledge and ethnopharmacology, especially to develop new,
effective synergistic drug combinations for management of difficult-to-treat
conditions like cancer and dementia,” said Mashelkar.
Many promising leads like
curcumins, withanoloides and others need to be taken to their logical
conclusions as despite the vast potential, very few success stories have
emerged from ayurveda. Most of the work in this field has remained within the
clinics of traditional practitioners or confined to academic research
laboratories and not taken seriously by industries, Mashelkar said.
Shrikant Vinayak Barve
Convener: We Love Ayurved
9403175973
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