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Faculty of Pharmacy Unair Has Long been Researching Herbal Plant as Medicine

 Professor of Faculty of Pharmacy, Prof Dr Mangestuti Agil (Courtesy: Esti Widiyana/detikcom)

Department of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Universitas Airlangga Surabaya apparently does not only study drugs made from chemicals, but  also does research on herbal plants to be used as medicine.

Evidently, this method has long been applied at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Universitas Airlangga. This was revealed by Professor of Department of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Universitas Airlangga, Prof. Dr. Mangestuti Agil.

"In the teaching process, we teach those related to medicinal plants. In our study, we conducted a related research to test their activity, isolate their substances, find out the side effects, perform standardization, and carry out research related to drug manufacturing products," explained by Prof. Mangestuti to detikcom at the Faculty of Pharmacy Building, Monday (03/09/2020).

According to her, Indonesia is the second richest country in medicinal plants. She also felt that it's a funny thing because now all drugs are unwittingly from plants.

"Quinine, the first malaria drug, is from the plant too. All of it is herbal," she said.

"Marijuana is also a plant, cocaine is also a plant. Duku in South America is the origin of medicine. But now people are misusing them," she added.

At Airlangga itself, is not a new thing to do research and testing of herbal plants into medicine. It is just that it is not exposed.

In fact, at Campus C Airlangga has its own special subjects of traditional medicine. Also master degree in Physiotherapy with plants.

"It's been around a long time. We tell the kind of plants and the benefits. People must know and we are giving them the opportunity to think in order to function natural materials," she concluded.