TAPPING MALAYSIAN HERBAL PRODUCTS’ VAST POTENTIAL
THE Malaysian rainforest is not only acknowledged as among the world’s oldest rainforest, but also ranked 12th in the world as well as 4th on the list of biodiversity hotspots in Asia after India, China and Indonesia.
Malaysia is endowed with 15,000 species of vascular and seed plants comprising more than 3,000 species of medicinal plants with high-value health benefits, which are readily available in Peninsular Malaysia as well as Sabah and Sarawak.
Historically, natural products have always been a rich source of novel pharmacological leads. With the ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge being an important and major asset of the medicinal plant-based drug discovery in providing hints for effective and safe chemotherapeutic compounds.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) reports, about 80 per cent of the world’s population still depends on traditional medicinebased healthcare. And despite the advancement in synthetic chemistry, most drugs in the market today as well those under development owe their origins to natural products.
In an article titled “Malaysian herbal monograph development and challenges” published in the Journal of Herbal Medicine (2020), Terence Yew Chin Tan and colleagues argue that the long medicinal and traditional use is neither a justification for marketing authorisation nor fulfilment of the “well-established use” requirements until it is proven scientifically and recognised as safe and efficacious.
Thus, modern herbal products, such as dietary supplements and phytopharmaceuticals, are the results of the approval and standardisation of traditional herbal products.
And with full government support, the Malaysian herbal industry is also enjoying rapid development in line with the growing global herbal industry owing to the increasing demand for healthy functional food, herbal supplements, herbs-based energy drinks and cosmetics.
Malaysia is also endowed with multiethnic cultures offering a unique combination of folk and traditional medication, such as Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, kampo and jamu for the development of the herbal industry.
Several herbal documentations have also been developed in the past, including the WHO monographs, British Pharmacopoeia, The United States Pharmacopoeia, and the National Formulary, The Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia, German Commission E Monographs, Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China, and the Japanese Pharmacopoeia.
Tofurtherelaborate,pharmacopoeia is a reference work for pharmaceuticaldrugspecifications.Descriptionsof preparations are called monographs.
Malaysia has equally developed its own monographs to ensure the quality and safety of herbal medicines, with the vision of transforming them into pharmacopeia in the near future.
The monograph basically contains specifications for the identification of plants using single chemical entities known as marker compounds or profiling techniques analysed with chromatographic methods.
It is in the light of this that the Centre for Natural Products Research and Drug Discovery (CENAR), Universiti Malaya, is currently working on the establishment of a UM nature-inspired library of natural products.
The goal is to develop a unified natural products library from Malaysia’s mega-biodiversity through the development of a physical and digital nature-inspired library with several hundreds of natural products’ extracts and pure compounds, based on traditional knowledge and scientific discoveries.
The work would greatly corroborate other ongoing compilations, such as the Malaysia Biodiversity Information System, the Natural Product Discovery System of the Universiti Sains Malaysia, the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre and Sabah Biodiversity Centre.
DR IDRIS ADEWALE AHMED
Visiting research fellow,
Centre for Natural Products Research and Drug Discovery (CENAR), Universiti Malaya