National Biodiversity & Drug Discovery Intelligence Infrastructure: Connecting Indonesia's Biodiversity to Biomedical Innovation

Indonesia is a library with shelves that run from the Sumatran rainforest to the coral reefs of the east, and most of its volumes have never been opened.

Indonesia covers only about 1.3% of the Earth's surface, yet it is home to roughly 10% of the world's flowering plant species, 12% of its mammals, 17% of its birds and a quarter or more of its fish. By SciencePreneur's own tally, the country's recorded species and documented collections (plants, animals, fungi and microbes) now number more than 794,548. Inside every one of those organisms is chemistry: compounds that help a plant fend off fungi or a sea sponge fend off bacteria. Some of that chemistry could become tomorrow's food ingredient, supplement or medicine.

Yet the national registry of communal intellectual property has officially recorded only 8,483 genetic resources and 491 items of traditional knowledge, a figure described at a UGM and BRIN discussion as very small next to the country's potential. Meanwhile, health ministry officials have said that more than 90% of the raw materials for Indonesia's medicines are imported.

Rich in nature, thin in records

Recorded species and documented collections (SciencePreneur tally)	794,548+
Genetic resources officially recorded in the national registry	8,483
Traditional-knowledge items officially recorded	491

A country can be rich in nature and still poor in data. And data is where discovery begins.

Why a leaf matters to a pharmacist

Nature has been the pharmacy's quiet supplier for a long time. In the most cited review of drug approvals, Newman and Cragg tracked 1,881 new drugs approved between 1981 and 2019. About a quarter of them were natural products, and the share is especially notable among antibacterial and anticancer agents.

Indonesia's own herbal heritage runs just as deep. According to the Ministry of Health's policy agency, around 9,600 of the country's plant species are known to have economic value and uses, including medicinal ones, and an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 are used in traditional medicine.

From forest to pharmacy

Share of the 1,881 new drugs approved in 1981–2019 that were natural products	~25%
Plant species used in Indonesian traditional medicine (estimate)	6,000–7,000
Drug raw materials imported (Ministry of Health statements)	>90%

But a leaf in a forest is not yet a lead in a laboratory. Someone has to record which organism it is, where it grew, what it contains, what it does in a test tube, and which community has trusted it for generations. That is the job of infrastructure, and it is where SciencePreneur has been building.

INPL: the chemistry shelf

The Indonesian Natural Products Library (INPL), at inpl.id, is a public database of natural products from Indonesian biodiversity. It is designed as a home for research results from Indonesian and foreign scientists alike: extracts, fractions and metabolites drawn from Indonesia's land and marine life.

It is not limited to one branch of life. INPL covers every kingdom: animals, plants, protists, fungi and monera. Each entry carries the basics a researcher needs: the species name, where the sample was collected, its bioactivity, its phytochemical content and the related publications. Every organism also has a note on where its physical sample is stored, so that a result on screen can be traced back to something real on a shelf.

INPL today, as displayed on inpl.id (6 October 2026)

Species	846
Phytochemistry records	578
Biological assays	169
Metabolites	305
Researchers	44
Documents	879

INPL is also available as an Android app on Google Play. More about the platform is on the INPL page.

It is worth being plain about scale. 846 species against 794,548 recorded species and collections is roughly one-tenth of one percent. In other words, the foundation is laid and almost the whole library is still to be written. That is the size of the opportunity.

CitMed: the community shelf

If INPL speaks the language of chemistry, CitMed, short for Citizen Medicine, speaks the language of use.

At citmed.id, CitMed is a public database of organisms with herbal potential for human life, open to researchers, educators, health practitioners and the general public in Indonesia. It spans plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms, and lets visitors search by kingdom and open a page for each species. Entries include familiar names from Indonesian kitchens and herbal traditions, such as putri malu (Mimosa pudica), daun jintan (Coleus amboinicus) and ketepeng cina (Cassia alata).

CitMed is also built as a citizen-science platform. SciencePreneur describes its purpose as bridging academic research and grassroots public health: inviting communities to contribute health data, raising awareness about medicines, and supporting decisions grounded in evidence rather than misinformation. People can register, contribute, and download the Android app. SciencePreneur lists the platform as registered with the Indonesian Patent Office in 2020. See the CitMed page.

This matters because the people who know a plant best are rarely the people who publish about it. A database that invites them in, rather than studying them from a distance, is a different kind of infrastructure.

From a leaf to a lead: one pipeline, two databases

Alone, each database is useful. Together they form the front end of a discovery pipeline that starts in the community and ends in a product or a drug candidate. Here is how the stages fit together.

1 · Gather: start with people and places

Communities, contributors and researchers point to organisms with herbal potential. CitMed is where that knowledge is collected and made searchable.

2 · Catalogue: give every organism an identity

INPL records the species, the place of collection and the location of the physical sample, which gives every later result a traceable origin.

3 · Characterise: read the chemistry

Phytochemistry and metabolite records describe what the organism contains. These are the fields where INPL holds 578 and 305 entries today.

4 · Validate: let the lab decide

Biological tests and peer-reviewed publications separate the promising from the merely plausible. This is the stage where a traditional claim becomes a measured result.

5 · Protect: secure the value and the provenance

Intellectual property, community rights and proper documentation of origin decide who benefits when a discovery turns into a product.

6 · Develop: take it to market

Food and wellness products can move first, through BPOM registration and halal certification. Pharmaceutical development is a longer road, through preclinical and clinical studies with industry partners.

One path already walked: Mangrovita

Does the pipeline work in practice? SciencePreneur has walked one path from plant to product.

In 2022, the team of Kholis Abdurachim Audah, Ph.D., published a study in Molecules on ethanol extracts of mangrove leaves. In laboratory tests, the leaf extract of Sonneratia caseolaris showed antioxidant activity comparable to vitamin C (IC₅₀ of 4.25 ppm against 5.25 ppm) and inhibited the growth of MRSA. That research now sits behind Mangrovita, a line of mangrove botanical products that has received BPOM registration and halal certification. Mangrove is one of the flagship datasets INPL is building. The full story is in Mangrovenomics: The Lab-to-Market Circular Economy of Mangrovita.

One plant, one paper, one certified product. Now imagine that path repeated across hundreds of Indonesian species. That is the case for infrastructure.

Why this should be national infrastructure

Roads, ports and power grids are called infrastructure because many people build on them and no single user could afford them alone. A shared, trusted biodiversity and drug discovery database fits the same description, for four reasons.

It ends the scatter. Indonesia's natural-product knowledge sits in journals, theses, herbariums and village memory. One searchable home saves every researcher from starting at zero.

It protects provenance. Records of where an organism was collected and where its sample is kept are the foundation of any fair benefit-sharing system. Government Regulation No. 56 of 2022 on communal intellectual property already recognises knowledge of healing and traditional medicine as traditional knowledge deserving protection.

It speaks to the world. Global resources such as NCBI and ChEMBL are where much of the world's chemistry and genomics data lives. A national platform that can connect with them lets Indonesian data be read alongside that literature, and lets Indonesian species enter the international conversation on their own terms.

It builds the upstream. A country that wants to depend less on imported ingredients needs a domestic place where new candidates are found, documented and validated.

The intelligence loop

When the pieces connect, knowledge stops moving in a straight line and starts moving in a loop. Communities share what they know. Science turns it into evidence. Industry turns evidence into products. Value returns to the people and places where it began, and the next round of discovery starts from a richer base.

↻ The discovery intelligence loop

1 · Communities contribute

Knowledge of herbal organisms, collected through CitMed.

2 · Organisms catalogued

Species, place of collection and the stored sample, recorded in INPL.

3 · Chemistry mapped

Phytochemistry and metabolites.

4 · Labs validate

Tests, papers and candidates.

5 · Industry develops

Food, wellness and pharmaceutical products.

6 · Value returns

Income, data and conservation, back to where it began. Then the loop turns again.

Open the book

Explore the libraries at inpl.id and citmed.id. If you are a researcher with data to contribute, a university or agency looking for a partner, or an investor who sees what a national discovery platform could become, SciencePreneur would like to hear from you: contact us.