Trials for 4 AYUSH formulations against Covid-19 to start within a week, says minister

The AYUSH Ministry and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) are working together on validating four Ayush formulations against Covid-19 , Union minister Shripad Y Naik said on Twitter on Thursday. He also said that trials will start within one week.

“The @moayush & the @CSIR_IND are working together on validating four Ayush formulations against #COVID19Pandemic and the trials will start within one week. These formulations will be tried as an add-on therapy and standard care for COVID-19 patients. I am sure and quite hopeful that, our traditional medicinal system will show the way to overcome this pandemic,” Naik said on Twitter.

CSIR Director-General Shekhar Mande and Ayurveda and AYUSH secretary Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha had said on Wednesday that the result will come within three months.

“Last week, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan announced that CSIR and AYUSH will work together on four different formulations,” Mande said.

Kotecha said that AYUSH and CSIR collaboration has a larger perspective. “This is once in a lifetime opportunity. This type of study never happened in our country. These four candidates are - Ashwagandha, Yashtimadhu (Mulethi), Guduchi + Pippali (Giloy) and AYUSH-64, which was invented for the treatment of malaria and its repurposing is going on,” he said.

“So, we are doing two types of stimulus studies as profile access on the high-risk population for Ashwagandha. We have also planned a competitive study between Hydroxychloroquine and Ashwagandha,” he added.

The AYUSH secretary said these four formulations will be tried as an add-on therapy and standard care for Covid-19 patients.

“It is a clinical study multi-centric on different parts of the country and variable design. For example, this clinical study is for the protocol. We have formed the taskforce and have prepared guideline for the clinical trial. Some of the best scientists of the country from the medical field, from CSIR and others, also reviewed this,” Kotecha said.

“We have taken advice from the ICMR so that it becomes so robust that it should be publishable into very high impact journal,” he added.

Mande said that Ayurveda is based on thousands of years of clinical practices that have been followed.

“So, we trust Ayurveda. We are not able to show the mechanism of action like modern medicine does. Ayurvedic practices have existed much before modern medicine practices come. Therefore, it is important that we validate some of the Ayurvedic principles. So, the time is absolutely right that in the fight against coronavirus. We try some of the Ayurvedic formulations against coronavirus,” he said.

He had earlier cited the example of China. “The Chinese have done very well in traditional Chinese medicine practices. They have been able to show why some of their medicines are effective,” Mande had said.