Traditional Knowledge Digital Library of India Brings Ancient, Indigenous Medical Systems Online

Submitted by LaVerne Poussaint

As of February past, 30 million pages of highly-codified ancient texts which comprise the Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) have been made electronically accessible by means of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).

Expert interdisciplinary teams of more than 150 traditional medicine (TM) practitioners, information technology (IT) engineers, patent examiners, intellectual property (IP) attorneys, scientists, researchers, and librarians engaged in a massive endeavour to construct a search-abstract-retrieve apparatus for India's indigenous medical and scientific knowledge resources which would fit within the framework of the International Patent Classification (IPC) scheme. The TKDL teams' efforts have now rendered available a novel, systematized arrangement of ancient and mediæval-era Indian medicaments within a secured database of dynamic content in accordance with modern conventions of taxonomy.

Built up from transcribed texts of the triad of Indian medical sciences – ayurveda, unani, and siddha - transposed sacred slokas of 14 ancient texts from the 6th- 3rd century BCE Vedic corpus and other authoritative Oriental canons and treatises of the TKDL repository serve as a digitized bridge traversing the public domain of cross-continental patent information.



The substruction of the 8 disciplines of ayurvedic treatment, its medicinal formulations, surgical procedures and instruments, plants and vegetable drugs, animal resources, metallic compounds detoxification, mineral preparations, prescription applications, modes of administration, herb and spice processing, risks and reactions; the 4 elemental elaborations of unani; the 3 divine, rational, and surgical methodologies of siddha and its alchemical amalgamations (composed of up to 250 ingredients); and asana yogic therapies has evolved into an exhaustively-developed online compendium of disease, dysfunction, causation, cure according to Indian life sciences theory.

Translation of palm leaf scriptural verses, parchment manuscripts, textbooks citations, and oral tradition references into decoded French, English, German, Japanese, and Spanish required Brahmi-based and other non-Latin script conversions of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi/Persian, Dravidian Tamil, and Urdu in accordance with international language encoding standards (ISO) and Unicode meta data. TKDL's in-house IT team developed "smart translation" software to produce the project's vast inventory of listings including scanned text and images from 54 primary sources on ayurvedic medicinal properties, provenance data, biological activity, chemical constituents, approximately 150,000 triad medicines and pharmaceutical preparations, 1,500 yoga asana therapies, traditional botanical names, malady descriptions, and other bibliographic details in contemporary terminology. It is anticipated that, in future, the protected portal will be decipherable in 20 foreign languages and all Indian dialects.
TKDL evolved from India's urgent presentations before the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) of its nation's need for efficacious international protections against bio-piracy which grants no acknowledgement to India as the source of origin of biological materials and genetic resources; against bio-prospectors who grant no informed consent to India as holder of the TM knowledge which engendered their products; and against Intellectual Property (IP) thievery from which India derives no benefit sharing. The new aggregation also serves to resolve the perpetual problem of lack of access to India's TM documentation due to language barriers or formatting incompatibilities, thereby abating loss of future revenue and resources while also facilitating dissemination of quintessential information on biodiversity conservation of native plants and crops concerns. India's desire to defeat the mechanisms of misappropriation and the issuance of wrongly-approved patents has also its galvanized efforts towards larger-scale manufacture of ISM products in the interests of its own citizens' health and already enhanced its scope to encompass the idea of TM exports for the well-being of others in the human family.

India estimates that it has lost more than 15,000 patents for exclusive rights, copyrights, and trademarks to the West and through its own expatriates. Several previously-approved patents authorized by Europe and the USA have been revoked as a result of the Asian nation's vigorous international IP battles. TKDL, conceived as a prevention measure, can evolve into an aggregate tool for trans-global collaborative clinical trial efforts and contracts for India with something approaching parity and reciprocity.

In February 2009, the European Patent Office signed a landmark 3-years agreement with TKDL. Its 34 member states now have restricted access for purposes of patent search and examination; no 3rd party disclosure is allowed. Other stipulations also apply, including citation disclosure and user input. CD ROMs and DVDs will be made available to worldwide patent offices by arrangement. TKDL is integrated with IPO's database as another measure to thwart illegitimately-gained exclusivity. One perceived flaw is the lack of accessibility to online backtracing of certificates of correction and defective patents. Patents for new uses, innovative delivery systems, different combinations, and novel variations of chemical entities and properties will still be granted. TKDL is seen by India as a safeguard against the burgeoning research-based fields of bio-pharmacology, integrative medicines (IM), evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), ethno-botany, and ethno-pharmacology.
Given jurisdictional shifts in USA health care regulations (where some medical insurance underwriters and HMOs are financing alternative treatments), TKDL will undoubtedly prove to be a much-sought-after research tool. Agreements with China, Japan, and the USA are pending.

LaVerne Poussaint contact information:
Plutonic Research & Knowledge Teams Intl (PRAKTI)
Email: laverne.poussaint@deepmed.net