National Telescope national telescope newspaper
By Daniel Ayantoye
In a bid to provide cure to the Worlds’ pandemic coronavirus, the Federal University Dutse, Jigawa has said it will soon commence clinical trial of plant-based COVID-19 medicine.
The Institution said this in a statement on its bulletin released on Friday, 24th April, 2020.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Fatima Batul Mukhtar said the university swung into action as soon as the pandemic broke in Nigeria and mandated the Directorate of Research and Development to come up with a home-grown solution to tackle the disease.
Prof. Mukhtar, who said the world over universities are established for teaching, research and community service, noted that, the institution decided to proffer solution to the infection as part of its community service.
Also speaking in a publication, the head of the research team, Dr. Salihu Ibrahim, said the university has collaborated with traditional medical practitioners to identify and extract medicinal plants with a recorded history of use against severe fever, protracted cough, and acute pneumonia.
“According to him, his team followed the time tested scientific steps of identifying, screening, and extracting the medicinal plant.
“He said the second step was the phytochemical screening and analysis of the medicinal plant where phytochemical activities were determined and analysed before the screening of the medicinal plants against microbial isolates.
Dr. Salihu said the evaluation of the toxicity of the medicine on experimental animals has been completed adding that evaluation of the acute toxicity safety profile for 28 days on experimental animals is in progress.
The head of the research team said the first clinical trials on healthy volunteers will commence on 14th May 14th June 2020 while the clinical trial on patients with pneumonia will start on 14th June- 14th July 2020.
