S.K.Mitra was preparing to go to the UK for a PhD when his professor asked him if he was interested in the Himalaya Drug Company. Mitra had studied pharmacology after his medical degree; he wasn't sure what he would do in an Ayurvedic company. Yet he went to Mumbai, where Himalaya was then based, to check it out. "I joined the company thinking that I would leave in six months", says Mitra. He is still there now as Executive Director (research).

Even in 1991 when Mitra joined, it was obvious that Himalaya had a different approach to practicing Ayurveda. Its successful brand, Liv.52, was launched after some research, which set it apart from other Ayurvedic products at the time. Himalaya's R & D center in Mumbai was a small unit that was trying to establish some methods and systems for Ayurvedic practice. The company had global ambitions and was under pressure to standardize its products and processes. It was trying hard to develop new products as well. So Mitra moved his office to Bangalore and turned it into a high tech laboratory, with equipment and people rarely found in Ayurveda.

If you walk into Himalaya R & D now, you wouldn't find it too different from the R & D of a Dr.Reddys or a Ranbaxy; the faint smell of herbs and the copious pictures of plants on the walls are the only clues to the labs real business. You could find an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, an expensive machine that could tell you the heavy metals in a herbal fraction. In another corner is a Real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine that amplifies DNA quickly. There is an HPLC (high performance liquid chromatograph), an Elisa reader, a flow cytometer, and so on.

Given an unknown plant, Mitra and his team can quickly separate biologically active ingredients, check their activity, isolate the molecule that is responsible (if any), and reveal its structure as well. He looks at classical texts for clues, but Himalaya has never launched a classical product so far, with the exception of 'Chyavanaprasha'. It has its own brand of Ayurveda whetted by modern science. Says Ravi Prasad, CEO of Himalaya: "Ayurveda is everything to us. But what we practise is contemporary Ayurveda, where we use modern methods to ancient knowledge".

S.K.Mitra, Executive Director (Research) at Himalaya's state-of-the-art laboratory.

Why apply modern science to Ayurveda? Anyone who has tried to do so has found it to be a formidable task, at least as difficult as finding a drug based on new chemical entities. Traditional Ayurvedic medicines are cocktails of molecules; a mixture may have more than a hundred ingredients. How do we decide what molecules have therapeutic value? The biological activity of the mixture could be from a single molecule or from the collective action of several molecules. Sometimes, a single molecule could be more potent when acting alone; sometimes it could be better in the company of several others. Is the combined knowledge of Ayurvedic physicians and classical texts enough in this matter?

Things have changed considerably since the standard Ayurvedic texts were written. A few thousand years of evolution have altered the chemical composition of plants, however slightly. Plants mutate as much as any organism. We would not know the effect of these mutations until we carry out tests in the lab.

Plants are also as affected by pollution. Medicinal plants can grow in areas contaminated with sewage water. Take those leaves, make a paste, and you may have a recipe for creating diarrhoea. It could even be worse, depending on your luck. If the plant grows in an area contaminated with battery waste, your medicine to cure arthritis could poison you with lead. We have cited two obvious cases. Let your imagination run free and reality will catch up soon.

Seasonal variations could be important too. Wrightia tinctoria, a plant found in North India, has a pigment with the requisite antibacterial action only in the summer months. Geography is another important factor; some herbs contain the active ingredient only if cultivated in specific places. Sourcing a herb from the wild is, thus, no longer a safe practice for an Ayurvedic company. Some Ayurvedic drugs react with chemical drugs and become toxic. Says Mitra: "Indian patients often do not tell their physician that they are taking Ayurvedic drugs. This is a dangerous practice."

Many of these factors were not important even 50 years ago. Bacterial contamination is probably not a recent phenomenon, but heavy metal contamination certainly is. So, making herbal medicines without checking the ingredients can be disastrous in the modern age. Unfortunately, analyzing herbs for their quality needs advanced technology that only big companies can afford.

Thus, Himalaya goes through the following process to develop a new drug. It surveys classical literature for clues about herbs. The herb is then procured, the active ingredients separated, molecules identified, structures elucidated. The herbal preparation then goes through animal toxicity studies - Himalaya has an animal house too - and human clinical trials, just as any other new chemical entity. It is not always that the company finds a single molecule or even a few molecules. More often than not, the biological activity comes from the combination of several herbs.

Mitra says that all the products that it has launched in the last ten years have gone through such rigorous testing and analysis. Rumalaya forte and Himplasia, two recent Himalaya drugs for arthritis and prostrate enlargement, have supposedly gone through seven years of studies, including multi-centric clinical trials on several hundred patients. The company is getting ready to launch a product for Hepatitis B next year after such clinical trials.

Himalaya could soon find data from its tests and its clinical trials invaluable in ways it had not imagined. As Mitra was being interviewed for this story, news came about a study by Harvard Medical School. Scientists there had found heavy metals in many Ayurvedic products from India. Low on their list, but still present, was Karela from Himalaya (some other major manufacturers have much higher concentrations of metals in their products). A perturbed Mitra shows results of all the tests his team has conducted on all recent batches of Karela; no batch had lead content of more than 0.1 parts per million. He is preparing to contest the findings.

We wouldn't vouch for the efficacy and quality of Himalaya's products; it is for doctors and patients to judge. But after a few days at its R & D centre, you return with the feeling that unleashing modern science on Ayurveda is not a bad thing. In the long run, it could be the only way to save this ancient science.