Professor files patent for herbal antibiotic formulation

LUCKNOW: Antibiotic-like compounds can be isolated from plant source. Priti Mathur, assistant professor, Amity Institute of Biotechnology (Lucknow), claims to have proved this with her research. She has filed patent for her ‘herbal antibiotic formulation’.

Amity University claimed that it was for the first time that anybody formulated antibiotic-like compounds from plants, as was evident by research papers published in national and international journals.

“Antibiotics provide the main basis for treatment of many bacterial infections but due to the alarming incidence of bacterial resistance like multi drug-resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB), extensively drug-resistance tuberculosis (XDRTB) and methicillin resistance staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to synthetic antibiotics, there is an urgent need for development of new antibiotic therapies,” Mathur said. In view of the problem, Mathur is evaluating different wildly growing plants in UP like Datura inoxia, Andrographis paniculata, Cannabis sativa, Calotropis procera, etc for their antibacterial activities.

She is working on ‘Isolation and characterisation of antibacterial compounds from wildly growing plants’ with her PhD student Chandni Tandon, in collaboration with Manodeep Sen of Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences and Sanjeev Kanojiya of Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow.

Mathur has done PhD from Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants and postdoctoral research from Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research.

She has filed two patents and published many research papers in reputed national and international journals, presented her work in various conferences and also got awards.

“We have a large diversity of plants and several hidden molecules are present in flora and fauna. Products derived from herbal plants have been widely used for primary health care in many countries,” she said.

“Studies show that though 1,700 types of natural antibiotics are known to be existing, very few are well-studied. If problems like AIDS and cancer exist in society, so do the solutions in nature. Since natural agents are known to have very less side effects and considered safer as compared to synthetic antibiotics, there is a need to search for such natural antimicrobial agents as a source of human disease management. These agents will be cost-effective and can be produced on a mass scale,” she pointed out. As the active compounds obtained from natural sources have complex structure, they have lesser cases of bacterial resistance. There is a need for further research on structure-activity relationship (SAR) of compound to make it more valuable for the pharmaceutical industry. This compound can be considered as a candidate drug (antibacterial) in appropriate concentrations, for therapeutic purpose.