The Federal University of Jigawa located in Dutse, the state capital says it has commenced the clinical trial of a plant-based COVID-19 medicine.

This was disclosed in a statement issued by the university on Friday.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Fatima Batul Mukhtar said the university swung into action as soon as the pandemic broke in Nigeria and mandated the Directorate of Research and Development to come up with a home-grown solution to tackle the disease.

The Head of the research team, Salihu Ibrahim, said the university has collaborated with traditional medical practitioners to identify and extract medicinal plants with a recorded history of use against severe fever, protracted cough, and acute pneumonia.

According to him, his team followed the time tested scientific steps of identifying, screening, and extracting the medicinal plant.

He said the second step was the phytochemical screening and analysis of the medicinal plant where phytochemical activities were determined and analysed before the screening of the medicinal plants against microbial isolates.

Dr Salihu said the evaluation of the toxicity of the medicine on experimental animals has been completed adding that evaluation of the acute toxicity safety profile for 28 days on experimental animals is in progress.

The head of the research team said the first clinical trials on healthy volunteers will commence on 14th May- 14th June 2020 while the clinical trial on patients with pneumonia will start on 14th June- 14th July 2020. (Channels TV)