IICB take on Safety Aspect of Drug Placentrex

By Swapan Das, Calcutta

The recent approach of Indian drug regulator bodies and Union Ministry of Health towards Human Placental Extract and its formulations has created huge fuss on its use. In India an  aqueous extract of human placenta is sold as drug under the trade name ‘Placentrex’, manufactured by the sole proprietor Albert David Ltd, Kolkata, and are pioneer in India in human placental extract therapy. While Indian   authorities following Western countries and USFDA protocols has raised issues with regards to efficacy and bio-safety of the decades old indigenous human placental extract product “Placentrex”, Japan and Korea seems to be confident on their research and products (“Melsmon”,“Laennec”).
[IMPT: Read more for the letter from Dr. Debasish Bhattacharyya, Scientist-F and Deputy Director of IICB on this issue]

In India the extensive research on human placental extract is done by Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB), Kolkata, a unit of CSIR, India. IICB is pursing the project on Biochemical Characterization of the drug 'Placentrex' since 1999 and thus our readers must be interested to know the take of the IICB scientists on this issue. So we have come up with a letter of Dr. Debasish Bhattacharyya, Scientist-F and Deputy Director of IICB on this issue on public interests. Our sincere thanks to Dr. Debasish Bhattacharyya and Dr. D.P. Ghosh, and we assure both of them that this letter has been published here with the only intention of reaching out to the visitors of this site and eventually to the general public with certain realistic facts on this issue.

The readers may "click" the following "snapshots" of the letter if they are having issues in playing the above presentation.

Part-II

Part-I

Part-III