What is INPL?
The Indonesian Natural Products Library (INPL) is a platform for database of natural products obtained from Indonesian biodiversity that had been scientifically proven to have medicinal potentials. The goal of INPL is to link virtual with physical repository of the Indonesian biodiversity-based research specifically for drug discovery purposes.
History of INPL
The story of INPL was started through a series of simple observations and literature studies, conversations and discussions on the availability and accessibility of information on natural products, particularly those who have medicinal purposes. Apparently, despite a long history of the use of traditional medicines and extensive research on natural products, it is not easy to find such information due to the lack of an adequate database. It was then the idea originated from which was to conduct a research in drug discovery based on the Indonesian biodiversity.
The research was started by using a seeding fund from the Swiss German University (SGU), so called Competitive Research Fund granted to Dr. Kholis Abdurachim Audah who just started as a faculty member at SGU in 2015. In this research, mangrove plant was used as a model to develop extracts library. The contents of the library include but not limited to location where the plant was collected, species identification, methods development and bioactivity. All these generated data will be entered to the database (initially designated as extracts library). Later, the term extracts library was changed to natural products library.
The research was then continued in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Irmanida Batubara from IPB University and Dr. Heru Susanto from the Chemistry Research Center, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (currently known as the National Research and Innovation Agency or BRIN). The research was funded by the Ministry of Research and Technology and Higher Education granted to Dr. Audah as the Team Leader (2017-2019). Understanding the magnitude of the works, a consortium of Extracts Library was initiated and officially established in 2018. The consortium consists of several universities and institutions, namely Swiss German University, IPB University, the National Research and Innovation Agency, Universitas Esa Unggul and Universitas Lampung.
In 2019, the first prototype of the Indonesian Natural Products Library (INPL) was developed and granted an Intellectual Property Right (IPR) from the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, the Republic of Indonesia. Currently, development of INPL is continued and opened for public to explore the available database. In 2023, INPL is expected to be opened for public to deposit their data so that INPL will have full capacity and become main reference for the Indonesian biodiversity-based research for drug discovery. This work is funded by the research grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, Republic of Indonesia (2021-2023).
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