The role of plants for traditional societies is hardly replaced by modern chemical medicines. Indonesia has long known about the advantages of various plants for health care and treatment and beauty. This is known as herbal medicine.
Various natural products of plants have become commercial commodities, which are attractive to the entrepreneurs of natural materials. The domestic market for herbal products even has increased from approximately 1 trillion rupiahs in year 2000 to 2 trillion in year 2002. This figure is estimated to continue to increase up to6 trillion in year 2010.
According to Prof. Dr. Mae Sri Hartati Wahyuningsih, Si, Apt, the condition above can be realized because of the abundant availability of biological resources of medicinal plants in Indonesian forests. It is estimated that approximately there are 30,000 species of plants in Indonesia, while about 9600 species of them are efficacious as medicine. Of that number, only about 300 species have been utilized for drugs industry and medicinal purposes. "The use of natural medicines for health treatment has long been practiced by Indonesian people because the results and benefits can be perceived directly. Therefore, no wonder if the use of herbal medicine tends to increase from time to time. It can be seen through the increasing use of herbal medicine by the community and the developing industry of natural drugs on the other side," she said in the Senate Hall, Tuesday (3/8) being inaugurated as a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine Universitas Gadjah Mada.
In her view, in developing natural drugs, there are several success factors. Some of them are the availability of raw materials, availability of drugs in sufficient types and amounts, guarantee of efficacy, quality of the validity of natural medicines in circulation and the certainty of society protection from drugs misuse that can harm the public. In the current circumstances, the most appropriate effort is to encourage the development of herbal medicines toward standardized herbal medicines and phytopharmaca in hopes of reducing dependence on modern medicine that nearly all its raw materials are still imported," said the woman born in Sleman October 3, 1960.
Delivering speech entitled Potential Development of Indonesian Natural Drugs for Cancer: Challenges and Hope, the wife of Drs. A. Zulkarnain Karim, M. Si, SE, Apt stated that the development of current anticancer drugs is besides being anti-proliferative against cancer cells, it is also against normal cells. Therefore, the anticancer drug has narrow therapeutic index and low selectivity. In addition, it is a fact that resistance to various anticancer drugs has emerged.
She said that the anti-cancer drugs cause the death of cancer cells through several work mechanisms. Some of them are stimulating apoptosis because the apoptotic program can be manipulated to stimulate the death, so genes and proteins play role in it and can be a target of anticancer development. AThey are also capable to regulate the cell cycle and control checkpoint. "Drugs in this class disrupt the cell cycle by affecting the RNA, DNA and other proteins that appear in the cell cycle so that they can inhibit proliferation and trigger apoptosis in sensitive tumor cells," the mother of three children explained.