After nearly 20 years of hard study, eventually the brainchild (herbal medicines from Crinum latifolium L.) of Dr.-Pharmacist Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram has also been circulated for use and reached out to the world market.
Searching for the herb called Crinum latifolium L.
To get the above achievement, Dr.-Pharmacist Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram had to undergo a lot of difficulty and challenge. In 1984, she passed the nationwide post-graduate examination and was sent to study in Bulgaria. For those days in Bulgaria, she studied hard day and night, the feeling of homesickness and missing her children sometimes made her tears drop. But then she told herself that she had to move on to the end once she had chosen that path.
There she studied chemical composition of cardamom’s essential oil with her wish that Vietnam would have medicines made from Vietnamese herbs to enter into the international pharmaceutical market. With a burning passion, she embarked on research, devoting herself to search for herbal materials of natural origin.
In 1990, she focused on searching for a valuable medicinal plant containing bioactive substances which help to stimulate the immunity and prevent the angiogenesis of cancer cells from the treasure of Vietnam’s medicinal plants to produce herbal medicines for treatment of oncological disease which is a disease that scientists all over the world are concerned about.
This task required her to travel around the country to seek and research. In Hue, Dr. Tram received information from local people about an herb that people here often used decoction from its leaves for drinking as experience of royal physicians. They called this herb Crinum latifolium L.
Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram devoting herself to studying Crinum latifolium L.
Then, Dr. Tram combined the experiences handed down by royal physicians, collecting Crinum latifolium L.’s bulbs from Hue citadel, Da Nang and Nha Trang for breeding, cultivating in Ho Chi Minh city and conducting research.
However, on those days, it was extremely difficult to have modern machinery and funding for scientific research projects. But with her passion and determination, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram found every way to overcome, doing fundamental research in the country while bringing her research project for cooperation with the Bulgarian Academy of Science where in 1985 she used to defend her doctoral thesis on chemistry and was retained to work as a professor assistant at the department of organic chemistry in Sofia university.
Vietnamese Crinum latifolium L. reaching out to the world market
Thanks to modern equipment in this country, Dr. Ngoc Tram and her foreign colleagues could extract bioactive substances inhibiting the growth of tumor cells. At that time, people often used blackthorn as herbal materials to produce medicines against the tumor but it was really incomparable to Vietnamese Crinum latifolium L.
Then the information on Crinum latifolium L. medicinal plant attracted scientists to work on research, and at the same time creating a period of information disturbance about research on Crinum latifolium L. in 1990s. But at that time, Crinum latifolium L. had yet to find a legal foothold in Vietnam’s pharmaceutical market.
After many years of searching and researching, eventually Dr. Tram’s medicinal herbal products from Crinum latifolium L. have been circulated for use.
Only by the end of July 2005, after nearly 15 years of “conceiving” (1990-2005) silently hard searching and researching, the brainchild of Dr. Tram was officially allowed by the Ministry of Health for circulation. “Crinum latifolium L.” was formulated into Crila capsule.
In October 2007, MOH’s official acceptance scientific council allowed additional treatment indications to Crila capsule for uterine fibroid diseases. Until now, Crila capsule has been exported to several foreign countries including the U.S.
Sharing with us on the achievement, Dr. Tram said: “For me, the most due that I have done is having produced a therapeutic herbal capsule with high treatment efficacy and low price for people to improve their health. Moreover, with this herbal medicine, I want to prove to the world that Vietnam can also produce good medicines from self-grown clean herbal materials. In addition, this also demonstrates that Vietnam can fully produce medicines which can stand firmly on the world market”.
Thanh Hien