PUNE: A team of scientists from Bharati Vidyapeeth has developed a herbal medicine which can help enhance the living conditions of HIV patients by reducing the viral load in body and improve their immune system without any side effects or drug resistance.

“My team has developed a herbal drug against HIV infection. It increases CD4 cells, responsible for regulating immunity of human being. It has also been found that this drug minimises the viral load of HIV infected persons,” Prof B B Ballal, Department of Microbiology, Yashwantrao Mohite College, Bharati Vidyapeeth University told Sakaal Times.

Ballal and Prof Chandrani Kundu were assisted by MSc Microbiology students Vishal Bhat, Yashpal Yadav, Sanika Veer, Smita Bayas, Nitya Sharma, Priya Mindhe and Dimpal Bhat in their research. The research paper regarding their drug development submitted in poster form at the National Conference on New frontiers in Herbal and Synthetic Drug Studies at Abeda Inamdar College recently, won the team Best Poster Award.

“As compared to Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) traditionally administered to HIV patients, our drug does not show any side effects. It also does not lead to developing drug resistance,” Ballal said. The work on this drug began in 1993. From more than 200 herbs, two herbs were shortlisted after chemical analysis.“After that, we blended the dose by taking written consent of respective patients and ethical committee. We developed two sets of drugs named Cytonini and Cytomaw. Under the guidance of registered practitioner Dr Vidya Wagh, we administered the first dose in 2002 after getting it tested for toxicity levels,” he said.

The toxicity tests were done at National Toxicology Centre, Pune. “After we got clearance from these tests, we began administering the two drugs for animal testing. Results showed the medicines were completely safe for use. Then clinical trials were done on 927 patients over a period of 10 years.” research student Vishal Bhat said.

In the clinical trials, it was found that the the viral load in most patients had reduced to as low as 400 from 2,00,000 to 5,00,000 RNA copies (nucleic acid essential for growth of HIV) per ml of blood.

“The CD4 count went up to 440 in many patients from as low as 150. This meant that the patients were in a better position to fight symptomatic diseases  associated with HIV. Their living condition certainly improves,” Yashpal Yadav said.

REGISTERING

“We have filed for patent for our discovery. On January 25, we got the quality control test called gama sterilisation of our drugs from BARC,” Ballal said.