Waikhom Sayanika Devi
University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ghana
Title: Development of a database of traditional African medicine: An innovative approach for drug discovery
Biography
Biography: Waikhom Sayanika Devi
Abstract
Traditional African Medicine (TAM) is one of the oldest and perhaps the most diverse of all medicine systems with different healing practices. Despite the growing attention given to traditional medicine (TM) worldwide, there is no well-known, publicly available, integrated bio-pharmacological TAM database for researchers in drug discovery. It is hypothesized that TAM database would offer comprehensive information relating to TAM-associated drugs, disease symptom, and protein relationships. TAM database will form an outline to accelerate novel drug discovery of many diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, hypertension and mental disorders. TAM database is a platform to build up a bio-pharmacological TAM network to explore the potential active compounds, functional mechanisms and its targets for drug discovery. The idea to develop TAM database tools is unconventional because it will accelerate the development of new therapy for many tropical diseases by reducing the time consumed, money spent, and toxicity occurrence which are the causes of hurdles in drug development.