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Bether Encapsulates
Inside the bubble: encapsulation inside microbubbles
In health-related industries, whether it is food, feed, pharma or biomedical, encapsulation is often used. Encapsulation means the packaging of an active ingredient, such as a drug, often at the micro- or nanoscale in order to shield it from the environment and release it at a certain place or time. Examples include the taste-masking of foul-tasting medicines or the protection of sensitive ingredients against harsh environments such as the stomach. A fundamental problem in encapsulation is to keep the active encapsulated for as long as needed without any leakage and then to release it fast and completely at the required place or time. Or, as described in a patent by Unilever:
Water soluble compounds are very difficult to encapsulate, they always tend to leak out at some point in time. If encapsulation is used which passes the test of time, it becomes a problem in itself to have the encapsulated product becoming bio available once ingested.
At Bether Encapsulates we believe we have the solution to this:
Encapsulation inside microbubbles.
This means encapsulating the active within a shell of gas. This shell of gas is a perfect barrier against leakage of the active as long as the active is non-volatile (which is the case for most relevant actives). However, just like soap bubbles our microbubbles can also be made to ‘pop’ and this instantaneously and completely releases the drug. This popping can be made to happen in response to triggers such as pH, osmotic pressure, shear or ultrasound making microbubble-encapsulation a very versatile and widely applicable technology. Other advantages of the technology include the use of a very small amount of excipients (since our main excipient is gas) and the fact that the barrier and release properties of the microbubbles do not depend on physicochemical properties of the active to be encapsulated. This ensures a short time-to-market.