Contemporising Ayurvedic Product Development Processes - A proposed guideline for developing appropriate technologies

Ayurveda is a traditional medical system of the Indian sub-continent, catering to healthcare of millions of people in India. In today’s times, Ayurveda requires scaled-up production and scientifically proven products. This in turn requires trans-disciplinary methodologies for product development that can leverage the existing knowledge in both Ayurveda and modern science and technology. Product Development in general has two steps, research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. Among the two, unlike in allopathic drugs, R&D in Ayurveda for new product development is in its nascent stage, lacking adequate references on modern methodologies. Such references are important in particular to new comers in the sector. The scope of this paper is to provide a write-up of the Ayurvedic processes and to propose a guideline for Ayurvedic product development that can be used for R&D. The methodology proposed was arrived at by referring selected classical Ayurveda texts and interacting with traditional and modern bio-medicine experts at the Trans-disciplinary University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The study documents three components in Ayurvedic product development namely product formulation-identification, product formulation-preparation and product formulation-validation which can be used to design the Ayurvedic product development methodology. The study also provides the role of different stakeholders in the Ayurvedic product development process. The study provides a methodology to design new Ayurvedic products before being taken up for manufacturing.