It’s some PEG fatty ester in combination with a polysorbate. The cool thing was that this had really minimal taste. 2% CBD.
Croda makes a line of super purified emulsifiers that have less taste than normal. Their polysorbate 80 is nearly tasteless.
For anyone just trying to make water soluble and isn’t worried about the emulsifier source (natural vs. synthetic), I recommend checking out pegylated emulsifiers. Different MW PEGs are esterified with a bunch of different fats to make some interesting emulsifiers. Vitamin E TPGS, for example.
Yes! Initially it looked good, until I got to ~0.5% oil loading, then it seemed the performance dropped. What I likely could have done was rotovap the water off to concentrate it, but rotovaping water at 70C is not very fun or scalable.
The Vitamin E TPGS is a bit tricky to use, although it is your water soluble emulsifier, it stays solid at room temp kind of like solidified coconut oil. Fastest way to get it in solution is to gently heat it, syringe it up, and add it directly under your probe if you are sonicating for the emulsion.
What kind of lipids were you trying to use as your lipid carriers/mix of lipid carriers?
Did you try a variety of food-grade lipids like olive oil, cacao butter, glyceral behenate/campritol? Any attempt at using raw hemp CO2 extract waxes and fats?
I was using isolate as my extract (only 89% pure, not the best stuff) and hempseed oil, olive oil, or MCT oil as my carriers.
I’m shooting from the hip rn, but my guess is that CO2 waxes and fats would be counterproductive because we are trying to load a specific bioactive.
I’ve found from my experience, that lowering the amount of carrier oil is helpful, I use it mainly to cut the viscosity of the distillate/isolate so I can get it to cooperate with my emulsifiers, but I also it plays a role as a binding agent for the bioactives and most* emulsifiers (typically lecithin).
What I did experiment with was pH! Especially because I was working with ionic surfactants (lecithins), my hypothesis being that lowering the pH would make the water more polar and create a stronger thermodynamic driving force that would stabilize the emulsion. I found this was the case with sonication when using just lecithin, and likely for my spontaneous nano trials (impatience makes for poor notes though ).
None of the spontaneous trials created stable nano-emulsions so its hard to say what helped or hindered. While the prediction of the acid assist to the thermodynamics could have helped form a nano-emulsions (a correct hypothesis), the acidic conditions could have protonated some of the head groups on the lecithins, making them less polar, accelerating coalescence making them kinetically unstable.
At the end of the day, I gave up and went to ultrasonic methods because I had one and I was able to get repeatable results. I also did this on an ultra-low budget (not particle size analyzer, nor did I send it for testing); I did crude tests where I dosed a 12oz glass of water with 10 mg and looked at the opacity of the solution, along with other longer-term tests. So take all of this with a modest lump of salt.
Also great for the shelf life, antioxidant, antimicrobial.
In my experience, winterizing these compounds off showed they are saturated fatty acids that are solid at room temp. I always wanted to find a use for them but as a carrier oil, not so much.
Is it considered ionic if the compound’s charge is net neutral? I have read that ionic surfactants such as caseinates work really well but have not tried.
I was imagining a situation where the solid fats and waxes from Raw Hemp extract are used in combination with some liquid lipids. The bright-color-pretty-picture below shows the basic idea. To make what’s called an NLC (nanostructured lipid carrier), a mixture of solid lipids and liquid lipids is used. Because these lipids are specifically not uniform in shape, they make amorphous crystals. As the pretty picture shows, these amorphous crystals have some benefits over SLNs (Solid Lipid Nanoparticles). I believe the supposed mechanism for why an amorphous lipid crystal would be a better carrier of bioactive is that the amorphous crystal does not spontaneously shift its conformation to a tightly ordered crystal over time very easily. When a lipid carrier crystal becomes more and more tightly ordered, it will expel the bioactive to the surrounding solvent (deposition).
Also, because the crystal is more amorphous, there is more room inside the crystal for bioactive molecules to fit (increased loading capacity). See pretty picture number 2.
Do you mean this as an argument against the idea that the hemp extract fats and waxes could be useful in making emulsions?
As if to say, “well empirical experience shows that when you take all those fats and waxes out, its easier to make a water soluble emulsion; so that probably indicates those fats and waxes would not be helpful”
Well, my initial reaction to this is to wonder what we are comparing here.
If we are comparing:
(A) a raw extract that has had none of its fats and waxes removed
vs
(B) a raw extract that has had all of its fats and waxes removed
I think there is a lot of wiggle room in between there. When making those NLCs, you need to get the proper balance of solid/liquid lipid. Maybe 100% or 0% isn’t the balanced number is what I am thinking.
Unless your solution has quite the voltage (to the point where it would likely explode or electrocute you if it were possible), you always need a counterion and thus ionic surfactants will be net neutral. A non-ionic surfactant would be something like polysorbate (80, 60, 40, 20 etc.) where there is no protonation sites that contribute considerably (alcohols can technically protonate, but so many orders of magnitude less than water, their acidity can be ignored).
My point was that i have never found a use for the winterized fats and waxes. Even though emulsions are easier to achieve with winterized oil, i think the point @Abouchar11 os making is that those fats and waxes add to the “bioavailability” if i’m not mistaken?
There’s a few things to account. One is how much emulsifier content is there in the ‘wax’ fraction that you’re removing? Another is if you are aiming for the same bioactive content instead of raw extract, are you titrating your emulsifier to the amount of bioactive or your lipophile? And finally, do you have too many variables in your ingredients (too much triglyceride in you extracts and/or too little emulsifier content in your emulsifier matrix) where you cannot formulate certain ratios of ingredients (impossible to solve system of equations). This is why I kept it simple using isolate, purified emulsifier, and an external carrier oil to cut some of the noise and variation by the questions posed.
Nah bioavailabilty is a bit different than just loading capacity. If you look at the picture of the SLN vs the NLC above (pretty picture 2) you can see the “density” of the bioactive compound (cannabinoids in our case) is greater for the NLC. There’s more of what you want inside each particle per unit volume.
If each of your lipid nanoparticles has more bioactive in it, that could lead to more bioavailability, but not necessarily.
I’m just wondering if those solid fats and waxes could be tried during the process of making NLCs. Guess there’s only one way to find out.
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