Sit began very early with the conscious vision of Giovanni Domini. A physician and pharmacist, university professor, and industry consultant, he immediately saw the future of his Casalvento property in pharmaceuticals. With other colleagues at the University of Siena, he collaborated on studies on active ingredients and formulated pharmaceutical products.
But what is an active ingredient? How can it be identified from the enormous quantity of elements present in a botanical? Does it have a unique receptor target to bind to?
By definition, an active ingredient is “a specific substance contained in a drug responsible for its therapeutic, curative, or preventive effect“.
And here lies the first difficulty. To obtain a “drug product,” the “active ingredient” must be isolated from all the other elements present in a botanical extract that influence its absorption, receptor binding, pharmacodynamics, and pharmacokinetics. Maximum extraction efficiency must therefore be followed by maximum purification and enrichment efficiency. Purification process is performed through chromatography, a technique that has seen repeated innovations in recent years. Stationary phase retains related substances (adsorption), while the mobile phase (eluent) allows the extract to flow through the former, separating the various compounds. The result is a more concentrated active ingredient without unnecessary molecules that interfere with the biological action.
Next challenge is the dosage of the active ingredient, performed with appropriate analytical techniques. This aims to obtain a titrated extract: a product in which the concentration and purity of the active ingredient are known. The foundation of today’s Evidence-Based Medicine lies in understanding absorption, bioavailability, site and mechanism of action, target organs, receptor binding, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and compartmental models of the active ingredient.
But how can this method be applied to Natural Medicine, where we have multiple active ingredients? In Naturopathy, we take a holistic and unconventional approach to disease. This discipline stimulates the body’s self-healing abilities through natural methods, nutrition, a healthy lifestyle, and herbal remedies, often including practices such as phytotherapy and aromatherapy.
It is therefore necessary to identify unconventional technologies to measure the effectiveness of Multiple Active Ingredients such as essential oils, hydrolates, and hyperhydro. A system for measuring effects focused on neurovegetative balance.