Drug Discovery and Ayurveda: Win-Win Relationship Between Contemporary and Ancient Sciences

The present medicinal system is dominated by the Allopathy or western medicine which is prominently taught and practiced in most of the countries world wide. This system is still evolving and during last few decades focus was based on chemical origin of most of the medicines. Thus majority of drugs in current practice are from synthetic origin. Even so, a large number of these synthetic molecules are based directly or indirectly on natural products or phytoconstituents (Gupta et al. 2005; Harvey 2008) . The interesting question is – what type of medicines were people using for thousands of decades? Another interesting futuristic question is – What type of medicine / therapy would emerge and sustain in future? Answers to such questions can be obtained by doing a systemic review of existing scientific literature and also by making a forecast based on emerging technologies based on genetic sciences. Another important arena of brainstorming is how we link such questions with each other. We need to understand medicines or systems those were existing in use before emergence of current “synthetic era” and visualize the future of medicine and health care in the “technology era”. The linkage between “the past” and “the future” of medicine is much more important and can give us “new directions” for better understanding health, disease and possible solutions. Ayurveda, one of the oldest systems used by mankind for well being(Sharma 1995), originated in ancient India many thousand years ago (about 4500 BC as agreed by most scientists). The origin, development, existence and even practice of Ayurveda has many dimensions and complex theories based on religions, faith and ancient Vedic science (Patwardhan & Mashelkar 2009). Discussion on all these aspects is beyond the scope of this book chapter. Ayurveda, as a system of medicine, is one of the official systems of medicine in India (Mashelkar 2008) and is also widely practiced in many other countries (Mashelkar 2008). Evidence for effectiveness of many ayurvedic drugs and therapies is being generated rapidly from many research institutes and also there are projects under way to decipher unanswered questions related to Ayurveda. In this chapter we have tried to cover different but important aspects which give us a futuristic vision. After giving an overview of basics of Ayurveda, a comprehensive review of current status of research in Ayurveda is attempted. In later part of the chapter a dialogue on the key term “Drug Rediscovery” is being