Here's How To Purify Natural Extracts

Extraction Is Just Step 1. This Is How To Maximize Your Revenues.

Mother Nature, or the Ultimate Medicinal Chemist

Medicinal plants and crops were always in special focus. Their studied and described positive effects on health existed way before modern medicine, and even today they still coexist, often as a preferred way of treatment.

Companies, focusing on plant-based products tend to acquire a relatively broad-spectrum product that fulfilled its purpose over hundreds of years as medicine or as a food supplement. 

Downstream efforts going beyond extraction are rarely used in this industry. However, the current trend shows, especially in pharmaceutical crops and nutraceuticals, that isolation using chromatography is a necessary step toward clean isolates. 

Isolating individual compounds often yields high-value materials, that can be further processed into APIs, or can serve as intermediates for further high-value targets. Trends also show that isolates of fractionated constituents derived from natural extracts are often preferred in previously synthetic-dominant environments.

Centrifugal partition chromatography offers many benefits, which are of particular interest to the natural product industry, as it:

- Can easily be scaled up to handle larger quantities (preparative scale).

- Offers a variety of solvent options, providing researchers with considerable flexibility.

- Allows for the separation of common matrix materials from the specific target analytes.

- Often achieves a high sample recovery rate, ensuring that a significant portion of the sample is successfully obtained.

Simplify Isolation: Isolate Valuable Compounds Directly

Several natural extracts contain valuable compounds that producers want to utilize in their products. However, these components are often accompanied by other less desirable components, from which the more valuable ones are difficult to isolate.

Compounds, such as Artemisinin, Cyclosporine A, Docetaxel and  Digoxin require some form of a purification step in the downstream process chain to be produced in a pure form.

Centrifugal partition chromatography offers many benefits for isolation and is capable of isolating valuable compounds directly from a complex matrix, therefore eliminating further purification steps, like HPLC.

The Most Cost-Efficient Chromatographic Solution

Natural extract downstream chains are typically focused on some basic steps. These include dry milling, or even extraction to a certain extent. Then the downstream moves to a final polishing step, and then dosing or packaging. Producers, who's downstream has no chromatographic step are missing out on high-value compounds that they could easily exploit, as they are working with products that contain those compounds either way.

Missing out on isolating these high-value compounds will result in a loss of potential revenue. By implementing chromatography in your downstream, you can process the hazardous waste that would have to be dealt with at the end of your purification chain and generate revenue at the same time. Centrifugal partition chromatography is demonstrably the most cost-efficient solution, far more affordable than any other solution.