The Vice-Chancellor, Federal University Dutse (FUD), Jigawa, Prof. Fatima Batul-Mukhtar, has said that the university would soon begin the clinical trial of a plant based COVID-19 medicine being developed by the university.
Batul-Muktar said the university swung into action as soon as the pandemic broke in Nigeria and mandated its Directorate of Research and Development to come up with home grown solution to tackle the disease.
In a statement in Dutse on Friday, the varsity’s spokesman, Mr Abdullahi Yahaya, noted that world over, universities were established for teaching, research and community service.
The statement added that the decision of the university to help in finding solution to this dreaded disease was part of its community service.
According to him, the Head of the Research team, Dr Salihu Ibrahim, said the team had collaborated with traditional medical practitioners to identity and extract medicinal plants with recorded history of use for the treatment of severe fever, protracted cough and acute pneumonia.
The spokesman quoted Ibrahim as saying that the team followed the time tested scientific steps of identifying, screening and extracting the medicinal plants.
“The head of the research team said 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.
“He 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 begin from May 14 to June 14, while the clinical trail on patients with Pneumonia will start from June 14 June to July 14.
