Could an old anti-malarial tonic be the cure for COVID-19? A pharmacologist from Bandung’s Padjajaran University in West Java is challenging Indonesian scientists to conduct additional studies on the efficacy of chloroquine phosphate, an antimalarial drug, to be a possible cure for coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Keri Lestari, a professor at the university’s pharmacology and clinical pharmacy department, said research in China had suggested that chloroquine phosphate, a derivative substance from quinine — a component extracted from the bark of a cinchona tree commonly cultivated in West Java — had a curative effect on COVID-19.

“Scientists have tested thousands of medicines, some showing promising results [to cure COVID-19], one of them is chloroquine phosphate,” she told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil has also urged universities to carry out further studies on the potency of chloroquine phosphate to cure coronavirus, which on Wednesday was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Lestari explained that research into chloroquine phosphate as a cure for COVID-19 needed to be done in a laboratory with BSL-III bio safety standards at minimum.

“Such lab standards are necessary in conducting research on infectious diseases. Padjadjaran University, Airlangga University in Surabaya, East Java and the Bogor Agricultural University in  West Java have laboratories with such standards,” she said.

Under normal circumstances, she said, such research would take a long time because researchers needed to carry out clinical trials. But to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, researchers in Indonesia could use prior research conducted by Chinese experts.

“China had conducted a toxicity study as well, so we only need to find the substance effectivity to [kill] coronavirus. We don’t need to start from zero,” she said, adding that the country already had a Tea and Quinine Research Center in Ciwidey, West Java.

The cultivation of quinine in Indonesia, especially on the island of Java, was pioneered in 1855 by Frans Wilhem Junghuhn, a German-Dutch botanist and geologist. Haryanto Kunto, the author of Semerbang Bunga in Bandung Raya, said Junghuhn had increased the number of quinine plants in Java from 167 to 1.3 million in six-and-a-half years.

Since then until World War II broke out, Indonesia supplied 90 percent of the world’s quinine powder, producing 11,000-12,400 dry cinchona bark every year.

Minute amounts of quinine have traditionally been used in soft drink flavorings, including a bartending cocktail standard, Tonic Water, normally used in Gin and Tonic and Vodka Tonic mixed drinks.