TKDL intervention thwarts Spanish patent piracy

Gone are the days when our country was destined to wait for years to get justice on its patent related claims. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) has done a commendable job as it helped the country in thwarting a bio-piracy bid at a record pace of three weeks. Following the timely intervention, the European Patent Office (EPO) which had earlier provided the 'intent to grant patent' order to Perdix group SL, a Spanish company, has now withdrawn it. The firm had applied patent for its anti-vitilgo cream based on melon extract.

TKDL, which has successfully completed the documentation process of over two lakh medical formulations till now, pointed out that hakeems have been using melon extract for many centuries in order to cure vitilgo as part of Unani treatment. Vitilgo, medically termed as leucoderma, is a skin de-pigmentation disease that has affected 65 million people, with Micheal Jackson being its most popular victim.

The TKDL venture to translate text on conventional Indian medical streams such as Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani from Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil to five major international languages, namely, English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish is sure to save India from future patent piracies.

Earlier, India had presented books like Quarabadeen Najmul Ghani, Khazain-al-Adviyah and Muheet-e-Azam before the EPO in order to prove its point. Even about a thousand years back, eminent Indian hakeems like Mohammad Najmul Ghani Khan and Mohammad Azam Khan were fully aware about melon's anti-vitiligo properties. Melon, bay rum and lemon when applied on white skin patches results in the increased regeneration of melanocytes.

Modern medicine offers only limited treatment options to cure vitilgo. Phototherapy, the mostly done mode of treatment against this disease, has a major drawback that even the unaffected skin cells will have to be brought under the powerful UV rays unnecessarily. Moreover, it needs to be done three days a week continuously for a minimum period of three years for procuring even a slight colour change.