Research Project Details

Evaluation of antioxidants, hypoglycemic, hypolipdemic and analgesic effect of plant Andrographis paniculata

Project ID: WUB/2022/P1/003

Project Duration: 2022 - 2023

Project Leader: Dr. Md. Harun-Or-Rashid (Department of Pharmacy)

Project Members: Farhina Rahman Laboni

Diabetes, obesity and analgesia are common disorder in human health due to oxidative stress in human physiology. Plants are generally used as medicines by various nations around the world, such as Chinese medicine and Indian medicine. Medicinal plants are resources of new drugs. Studying medicinal plants helps to understand the plant toxicity and protect human and animals from natural poisons (Emon et al., 2021).

A. paniculata, belongs to the Acanthaceae family; an herb and grows in tropical and subtropical countries, particularly abundant in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is the rich sources of phenolics and flavonoids (Okhuarbo et al., 2014; Hossain et al., 2014) along with alkaloids, saponins, steroids and glycosides. Hence the plant has been used for centuries for the treatment of various diseases such as cancer, influenza, diabetes, hypertension, ulcer etc in Asia, America and Africa (Akbar, 2011). Modern pharmacological studies suggested that A. paniculata had the anti-tumor and immunomodulatory effects in vitro and in vivo (Sheeza and Kuttan, 2010). The secondary metabolites including diterpenoids, glycosides, lactones and flavonoids are responsible for pharmacological activities of A. paniculata (Okhuarbo et al., 2014). Recent studies evaluated that A. paniculata plant extract showed potent anticancer and anti-diabetic activities (Richard et al., 2017; Akhtar et al., 2016). Being the potential medicinal value of A. paniculata, it is encouraged to discover the active constituents which are responsible for those activities.

Therefore, we designed to evaluate the antioxidant, hypoglycemic, hypolipidemic and analgesic activity of A. paniculata stem extract and attempt to isolate the responsible plant metabolites. To peform this research, we designed sequential processes such as collection and preparation of plant extracts, screening and estimation of plant metabolite, evaluation of antioxidant, hypoglycemic, hypolipidemic and analgessic activities. Further method can be extended to purify the pharmacologically active constituents by various chromatographic techniques such as gel filtration, TLC, PTLC, HPLC. A. paniculata is a rich source of polyphenols which can serve as antioxidants and expected to obtain the potentially bioactive polyphenols which will provide those stated therapeutic values.