Research into drugs produced from natural products and traditional medicine holds much promise to a country that has vast natural resources, B.S. Unger, scientist at Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), National Institute of Traditional Medicine (NITM), said in Chikkodi on Wednesday.
He was speaking to science students of KLE Society’s Basava Prabhu Kore Degree College.
“It is a commonly held belief that natural products are very good for the human body. But they are underutilised source of chemical diversity for drug discovery. However, bio-active compounds isolated natural sources have given rise to a wide range of human therapeutics,” he said. However, due to some problems, the field of traditional medicine and natural product research has not grown as expected.
The important challenges are to isolating pure compounds from crude extracts and validation after experimentation. He cited the successful example of Zebrafish-based bio-assays that are suited for research in drug discovery.
