Monday, August 12, 2002		Feature

Rescuing Indian drugs
Shiv Kumar

Come December and bio-pirates will find it almost impossible to re-engineer traditional Indian medicine formulations and patent these as original inventions.

All patent offices will need to do is log on to the Internet and enter details of the patent application to find out if the applicant was beaten to the game a few centuries earlier.

The first phase of an initiative by the National Institute of Science Communications (NISC) to compile a comprehensive database on Indian traditional knowledge is nearing completion by December.

"We don't want anyone to patent what we have and we are sitting on a goldmine," said NISC director V.K. Gupta. The institute is an affiliate of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

According to Gupta, the first phase of the project will tabulate the details of 2,147 medicinal plants and more than 35,000 medicinal formulations derived from them in the Ayurveda branch of Indian medicine.

In subsequent phases, medicinal plants and formulations from the Unani, Siddha, Tibetan, Chinese and Naturopathy branch of medicines would be added to the database. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) project, as it is called, will then begin compiling knowledge from tribal communities, Gupta said.

The institute has already tied up with patent offices in the Britain, Japan and the U.S. for access to the library on a confidential basis. "They will sign a non-disclosure agreement with us," Gupta told IANS. According to Gupta, a task force comprising 30 scientists and researchers from various disciplines have been set up for the purpose. The Indian government has earmarked Rs. 350 million for the purpose. However, the project cost may mount to Rs. 2 billion if the cost of translating the content into different international languages is also factored in.

Gupta pointed out a mid-size pharma company in the U.S. spends more than this on researching a single formulation.

The institute will simultaneously work at forcing several traditional formulations off current patent lists. According to Gupta, initial research of the institute has indicated that as many as 360 out of 762 patents studied by the institute were provided to be derived from medicinal plants of Indian origin. Gupta says the Indian government must now working at getting the patents on these formulations cancelled. The Indian government believes that the initiative would save it several years of work to prevent the loss of patent rights. After American corporations tried to patent varieties of neem, turmeric and basmati rice, the Indian government spent several years and millions of dollars to prevent loss of the country's Intellectual Property Rights.