Semarang – Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease that is very common in Indonesia. One of the causes of this disease is the failure of the pancreas to produce adequate amounts of insulin, which causes an increase in blood glucose levels. The Indonesian Ministry of Health states “DM is declared a global disease by the World Health Organization (WHO). The International Diabetes Foundation also estimates that there are 382 million adults living with DM and will continue to increase to reach 592 million by 2035”. Indonesia as a country that has abundant biodiversity has the potential to overcome health problems by utilizing its natural resources, but this still not much done. One of the potential natural resources is Ciplukan (Physalis angulata)
UNDIP Student Team consisting of Sekar Arum Ayu Firsanti (Pharmacy 2019) as the team leader and members namely Eka Meilinda (Library Science 2019) and Hendrianto Arief Hidayat (Electrical Engineering 2019) created a sugar substitute herbal sweetener to prevent the occurrence of hyperglycemia called CISU (Ciplukan Sugar). This product was contested in the Online Science Project Competition (OSPC) 2020 held by the Indonesian Young Scientist Association (IYSA) on February 17th-22nd February 2020. In this event, Sekar and his team won a bronze medal because of their unique work that is very beneficial to the community.
OSPC 2020 has a flow of activities. The first is sending a journal that will be selected by the jury, then promote the work through social media in the form of videos and interesting infographic posters so that the public can get to know more about the products being contested. After the selection process, the winner of OSPC 2020 was announced on the website and directed to take part in international competitions.
“I am very happy to be able to take part in the competition because I can try various activities, make lots of new friends and also new experiences in making journals that can later be published to the public,” said Sekar.
In the previous year, the UNDIP delegation consisting of Muchammad Faris (Pharmacy 2018) and Jesica Rahmaningrum (Chemical Engineering 2018) succeeded in winning the gold medal in the field of Biomedical Science with their scientific work of procoagulant gel from brown algae (Padina australis) as the first aid for arterial bleeding. The work received great appreciation from IYSA and has been a candidate at the 2019 World Young Innovators Exhibition (WYIE) competition in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the 2019 Japan Design Idea and Invention Expo (JDIE) in Tokyo, Japan.
In this work, Faris and Jesica managed to find a number of flavonoid compounds that have efficacy as vasoconstrictors and induce thromboxane A2 synthesis. The synergy of the effectiveness bioactive compound and the high viscosity gel in the product is able to handle arterial bleeding well, which is a major cause of blood loss in a short time. This work certainly gets a lot of help from the supervisors at the Pharmacy Study Program, Dr. Khairul Anam and Widyandani Sasikirana, M.Biotech, Apt., and also Dr. Yenny Meliana as supervisor from the Pusat Penelitian Kimia (P2K) LIPI.
Written by: Muchammad Faris/Fitri Wulandari