About Immune Enhance
Immune Enhance is proud to be an authorized distributor
for the herbal medicine products manufactured by LIFEnhance, Inc.
>> Personal note from Immune
Enhance’s
president
Who is LIFEnhance, Inc.
LIFEnhance, Inc. is a a nutraceutical company that researches,
designs and formulates herbal medicine for enhancing cancer patient’s
quality of life. The founders, Dr. William Zuo and his partner started
the parent company in 1993 in manufacturing anti-cancer compounds. More
then a decade’s experience in the research and study of anti-cancer
agents led to the creation of LIFEnhance and the designs of herbal medicines
for cancer support treatment. Rigorous scientific research was conducted
testing over 10,000 Traditional Chinese Medicinal Herbs. Based on selection
and combined with modern science and technology, LIFEnhance designed
these advanced formulas that have extraordinary potency and efficacy.
The company has adopted the exacting level of excellence for product
quality and manufacturing standards, in its line of all-natural, botanical
extract formulations, specifically designed to enhance the quality of
one's life. They have been prescribed by hundreds of doctors and used
by thousands of patients. In 2006, collaboration between LIFEnhance and
the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, was formed. A research
grant with NIH used the LIFEnhance products as complementary to the conventional
cancer treatments was accepted. Ongoing clinical studies are being conducted
by several clinics in the US. One of recently completed studies has been
published in the American Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Vol.
7,1 No.1, 2006.
LIFEnhance’s products are scientifically researched and clinically
tested for toxicity and efficacy. The studies were conducted both in
China and the U.S.A. There were also independent clinical studies done
at the American Integrative Medical Association in Norfolk, Virginia.
These botanical products are proven to be fast acting, potent, yet non-toxic.
LIFEnhance’s proprietary manufacturing process uses the latest
technologies in solvent-free extraction and purification to produce the
highest concentration, quality and purity of product. Product analysis
(COA) were conducted both at LIFEnhance’s labs and at the prestigious
Milwaukee based Covance Labs for pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals
(Arsenic, Cadmium, Lead, Mercury), bacteria, yeast and mold.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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