LIFEnhance’s New Technology for Herbal Medicine

 

The compounds of herbal medicines are so complicated that some of them are useful; some are ineffective and even toxic. Choice of processing technology to use for extraction of effective components will be critical. The commonly used extraction methods include: decoction, circumfluence, maceration, digestion, and percolation. Ordinarily, all those traditional processing technologies cause problems such as great loss of effective components, lower purity, and poor yield. LIFEnhance, with over ten years research and development, has licensed and developed in-house, many new technologies and methods for the extractions of herbal medicines. These methods and technology facilitate the extraction to manufacture herbal medicines according to the Traditional Chinese Medicine theories with better yield and high purity of effective constituents. This article will briefly introduce these new technologies used by LIFEnhance.

 

I. Pulverization

Pulverization is necessary for herbal medicine prior to herbal treatment. After smashing the herbal materials, the surface areas of medicine are increased. Thus the herbal medicine is more easily dissolved and assimilated. In most herbal medicine manufacturing, the mechanical pulverization method is used to smash the materials. It can make the powders size around 75μm. LIFEnhance, however, uses ultrasonic and ultra low temperature technology to do the pulverization. It makes the medicinal powders size much finer to below 5-10μm. With this degree of fineness, the 95% cell coat of the herbal medicines will be broken, releasing the effective constituents directly and making them dissolve and function more rapidly and completely. Compared to the mechanical pulverization, in the process of using ultrasonic and ultra-low temperature there are no partial overheating with high speed of smashing in low temperature, so the bioactive of medicinal components and nutritional contents are reserved.

 

II. Extraction

The extraction methods currently used by most of the herbal medicine manufacturers are decoction, circumfluence, maceration, digestion, percolation, reflux extraction, distillation, etc. There are many new technologies that have been either innovated or applied by LIFEnhance to the extraction of the herbal medicine. These methods are semi-bionic extraction, supercritical fluid extraction, ultrasonic extraction, pressure countercurrent extraction, enzyme extraction, HSCCC extraction, and pulping extraction.

 

1. The semi-bionic extraction method comes from the concept of combining holistic medicine and molecular medicine to simulate the progress and circumstances in which the oral medicines are taken and absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract. The production process is that medicine materials are extracted first by acid water and then by alkali water with appropriate pH values. The optimal pH values and other progressing parameters are obtained from optimization of the principal indexes pharmacological action of one or several effective components of herbal medicines.

 

2. In the supercritical fluid extraction, the extracting agent is a type of fluid under the supercritical condition. Then it is used to extract the effective components from the liquid or solid medicine materials. Carbon dioxide-CO₂ is the most commonly used supercritical fluid because of its excellent characteristic of non-toxic, non-corrosive and appropriate critical condition (7.488 Mpa, 304.15K). Compared to the traditional extraction methods, the supercritical fluid extraction can proceed in close to room temperature, with high purity of extracts, no organic residual solvents, and almost all the effective components remaining. But this is not a cost effective method.

 

3. Ultrasonic wave can accelerate the frequency and velocity of molecular vibration and be used in the extraction. This characteristic enhances the osmosis of the solvent and accelerates the effective component extraction.

 

4. The extraction procedure of pressure countercurrent extraction is connecting of several different facilities in series, then circulating the flow of solvent and medicine materials reversely and keeping a period for sufficient contact.

 

5. Enzyme extraction is for the elimination of the useless starch, pectin, protein, etc., effectively with the relevant enzyme digestion. Those fat-soluble and water-insoluble components can be transferred to water-soluble glycosides through the digestion of partially hydrolyzed starch product and glucose hydrolase or glycoside transferase.

 

6. High speed counter current chromatograph (HSCCC), extraction is a kind of extraction technology that can dispense and separate different components continuously and effectively. It shows its characteristic functions in the natural medicine research. Being a sequential, automatic, extremely efficient and non-high-voltage chromatograph system, it can isolate and analyze several microgram components, prepare and purify several grams or hundreds of milliliter products, separate from mass crude samples at intermediate stage, and make direct or indirect high-purity separation.

 

7. The pulping extraction method makes plant materials finely ground in the relevant active solution to separate the effective components. Some researchers develop a new pulping extractor which consists of a high-speed electric engine, grind cutter, container, machine base, principal post, velocity modulation switch, and so on. The engine velocity has two levels of high and low speeds. The whole process span, in which the medicines can be grounded into pulp, is just 1-2 minutes.

 

For different kinds of herbal medicines, LIFEnhance chooses the best extraction methods to obtain the best quality of formulations. The company has, over the years developed many “know how” processing technologies for natural herbal medicines. Some of these new processing technologies will be patented in the near future.

 

III. Isolation and purification

The Isolation and purification technologies are also very important. The common isolation methods are precipitation, filtration and centrifugation, etc. The purification methods are water-ethanol extraction, ethanol-water extraction, acid-base extraction, salting out, ion-exchange and crystallization methods. The water-ethanol extraction is a comprehensive purification procedure that has been in use for a long time and been found to decrease the yield of medicine components, such as alkaloid, glycoside, organic acid, especially polysaccharide and trace elements. Many advanced process technologies, which include flocculation, great-porous resin adsorption, ultrafiltration, high speed centrifugation have been implemented by LIFEnhance for the isolation and purification process.

 

In the flocculation extraction of medicines, some flocculating precipitators are added to suspended herbal medicine extract or concentrated extract. Here many kinds of precipitators can be used, such as tannin, gelatin, egg white, 101 juice clarificant, ZTC clarificant, chitosan, etc. The flocculation extraction produces inter-molecule reactions with proteins and pectin by joint-absorption and charge-neutralization, to precipitate and remove rough particles. As a result refined and high quality medicines are obtained.

 

Great-porous adsorptive resins were developed as organic high polymeric adsorbents in recent years, which were applied to the extraction of effective herbal medicine components. The data, which come from the absorption trials of polysaccharide, alkaloid, flavone, etc. and the relevant component extractions of Rhizome Gastrodiae, Peony root, Ganoderma Lucidum, Manchurian rhododendron, show that this method is adequate for the extraction of water miscible compound from herbal medicine. The extracts from the specific sections of some single-type medicine such as Goldthread, Kudzu root, root of red rooted Salvia and Gypsum, with the ingredients of alkaloid, flavone, water miscible phenolic components or inorganic minerals, were researched in a dynamic adsorption trial to compare their adsorption characteristic index. It proves that the resins can absorb different components, except inorganic minerals, to refine the medicines. Furthermore, all the resins can gather trace hydrophilic phenol derivants from very low content solutions, which can be recovered easily from the resins.

 

Ultrafiltration is applied to screen the molecules with different size and structure by membranes. It can separate the molecules with MW between 1, 000~1, 000, 000 daltons for isolation, purification, concentration or salting out. It is usually applied to remove the bacteria, particles and macromolecule impurity such as colloid, tannin, and protein.

 

High-speed centrifugation is the technology in which high-speed rotation of centrifuges produces much stronger centrifugal force than gravity force thereby accelerating the precipitations of rough particles in extraction solution. The separation by sedimentation-type centrifugation is time and labor saving, with high recovery rate, high concentration of relative components and good clarity. This process also isolates the components from the solution containing minute particles hard filtered or suspended floccules.

 

Molecular distillation is a new technology. During the separation progress, materials are maintained in a fine vacuum at low temperature, for a short duration in the container and with minimum loss. Therefore this kind of separation technology is suited for high-boiling and low-thermosensitive materials, especially the separation of perfumed or thermosensitive natural herbal medicines.

 

To sum up, the finished products will be much better in terms of quality and effectiveness if more than two technologies are applied in the isolation and purification of herbal medicine components.