Four new approaches for validation of Ayurvedic herbal drugs.

On 25th May 2009 at the Homi Bhabha Birthday Centennial lecture at BARC in Mumbai, I pleaded for the urgent need to apply radiotracer technology for the validation of Ayurvedic Herbal drugs. Every new molecule introduced in modern therapeutics is first labeled with C-14 to study its absorption, biodistribution and excretion in small animals. The only tritium labeling effort of a Chinese herbal drug, Ginseng, was published in French in 1992. My new project, with financial support from DST and DBT, has been launched in collaboration with Board of Research in Isotope Technology (BRIT). Tritium labeling of Arjun bark, an important Ayurvedic drug, has been successfully accomplished and its biodistribution in small animals is being studied. Feeding C-14 urea as a manure to plants will be used as a novel approach for radiolabeling of various parts of the plant – bark, leaves, flowers, etc. and the C-14 radiolabeled plant parts will be fed to small animals and whole body autoradiography[1] will be performed to study the biodistribution of the herbal drugs. To begin with, 40 single drugs described by Vaghbhata will be taken for study.