Homegrown herbal supplement launched

The food supplement from the extracts of tawa-tawa plant is being developed as a potential drug to aid in the recovery of dengue patients by home-grown Herbanext Laboratories that is based here.

Philip Cruz, president of Herbanext Laboratories, led the launching of Daily Apple Tawa-Tawa capsules yesterday in their plant. He was joined by the executives of Generika drugstores, headed by Jay Ferrer, vice president for operations. Generika will distribute the capsules nationwide.

Cruz said that, from their extensive studies, they discovered that tawa-tawa plant increases platelet count. He stressed that it is very safe. “Tawa-tawa can be consumed for three to five days to treat dengue cases…it’s not harmful,” he added.

He said the Food and Drug Administration has already approved the capsule, while the Department of Science and Technology has helped fund the program through a loan of P8 million.

“DOST supported the conduct of the research. The fact that they supported it, they believe in it,” he added.

He said they are scaling up the production of the capsule for distribution, but have prioritized Negros and other areas with high dengue cases to help hasten the recovery of patients.

Moreover, he said, they sourced the tawa-tawa plants from the indigenous people’s community in Isabela town. “We have clean raw materials from the wild…many traditional medicines came from the IP community,” he said.

He added that the province has enough supply of the tawa-tawa plant.

He said the challenge is to make sure the raw materials are clean and have the presence of the critical compound. He added that DOST will help in the propagation of the plant and develop a technology to help in large-scale production.

Meanwhile, Herbanext has yet to conduct clinical trials for the supplement, meaning, testing this on humans.*MPE