OmniActive health technologies awarded EU patent

Tag: Vegetarian capsules

OmniActive Health Technologies today announced it has been awarded a patent in the European Union for its novel vegetarian beadletting technology for dry delivery forms of lipophilic nutrients. The technology, which was earlier granted a patent by the Indian Patent Office last year, was developed to resolve common problems faced by formulators of nutritional products. It enables the seamless incorporation of various unstable, oily, or lipophilic ingredients — such as lutein, other carotenoids, essential fatty acids, fat-soluble vitamins, phytosterols, and lecithin — into dry tablets and capsules.

Until now, conventional technologies based on gelatin, dairy products, and starch, have been used for stabilizing such nutrients into free-flowing dry forms such as powders, beadlets, and granules. Beadlets made with OmniActive’s OmniBead™ technology present significant improvements over these methods.

OmniBead™ technology allows a wide range of nutrients to be stabilized in a dry matrix — without using any animal-derived ingredients such as gelatin, lactose, or casein. In fact, a wide range of products, all laboratory-validated to have a minimum shelf life of two years, have already been launched using OmniBead™ technology.

OmniBead™ technology requires a lower percentage of inactive ingredients than conventional technologies, making more space available in the beadlet for the actives. “The novel beadlet design facilitates the highest known payloads of active ingredients in the industry,” stated Abhijit Bhattacharya, Chief Operating Officer of OmniActive. The innovative technology allowed the company to introduce 25% lutein beadlets and 20% lutein esters beadlets over three years ago — a difficult feat to accomplish with traditional technologies.

The vegetarian beadlets manufactured through OmniBead™ technology are spherical, with a very small particle size — typically within the 400 micron range. That makes them extremely well-suited for withstanding high forces of tablet compression, without causing the leaching or bleeding of actives into the tablet matrix that is common with conventional technologies.