Turmeric ... ongoing.
It's not meant to replace professionally made products.
Any questions suggestions are welcome.
@johan
Dear Johan. Thank you!!
Turmeric ... ongoing.
It's not meant to replace professionally made products.
Any questions suggestions are welcome.
Hi Asafsh,
Looks great indeed. ? What are the steps you are taking and the raw material?
Kind regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel
Thank you! 🙂
The material is raw milled turmeric available here locally. I was greedy to not to buy load cartridges for the soxhlet therefore ended up putting cotton on bottom of glass, then loaded with milled turmeric, and put cotton on top of it. Then device loaded with pharma quality 95% Ethanol and extraction started.
Some notes that could be interesting to those who will try that at home:
- turmeric is milled to very fine particles and (i guess) contains viscous oils, when thinner wets the turmeric i can't get pure soxhlet cycle - extract drops slowly through outlet. May be i put too much pressure on cotton put on bottom.
- thinner is expensive here, and difficult to obtain - government banned pure alcohol sales in markets, so only through pharmacy, and only if you have connections. Perhaps by sacrificing efficacy i would next try maceration using shaker and then distillation.
For this setup i will stop extraction when color of extract in outlet will go somewhere near transparent. Right now dark purple in collector glass, but still light yellow drops coming out of outlet.
Next step will be evaporating the thinner and concentrating solution. I still need to decide with formulation, perhaps will add cold pressed olive oil to the extract before concentration and once ethanol will be recovered through distiller, then it will end up with olive oil based turmeric extract. Or i may leave small amount of ethanol there and decide later.
Kind Regards
Asaf
You are welcome Daniel!
Yep, governments are really good at putting obstacles 🙂
I didn't decide on how to use the Curcumin yet. Actually, it is done to test the setup.
As you kindly explained before commercial products may have better bio-availability. May be test whether we can suppress inflammation caused by intratumoral bacteria she experience through nasal cavity (may try to start with 2-3 drops bid of diluted and properly formulated extract and then add a bit more if no adverse effect will be there, but will try on myself first 🙂 )
But actual reasons for this projects are:
- lack of commercially available products with known pharmaceutical features available localy. There are quite number of products manufactured here served to meet customer demands (perhaps pumped by yellow magazine alike media articles, popular science etc), but neither method of extraction nor formulation, pharmakinetics etc are specified. So the quality isn't predictable. I can't say that what i am doing is predictable too, but at least process parameters are manageable up to some extend.
- while searching for sarcoma papers i could notice that for almost any drug used in in-vitro tests, there are herbal plants that could do the same job, with lesser efficacy of course(let say, mtor, kynase ... inhibitors, protein regulations). So supplements you suggested for metabolic or any other any combined treatments do some kind of targeted therapy job as well. Knowing at least in-vitro tested targets from pubmed archive and finding their corresponding plants may help to identify most efficient mixes and help to defeat the disease from different angles at the same time. ( i suppose that what you are busy with right now also address this. offering custom formulations backed by scientific evidence is a big advantage and market is empty indeed). I just try to understand whether all this is feasible on my small scale of one cancer case. if i will succeed in extraction then i may contact local molecular labs for in-vitro cell tests (needle biopsy) against various combinations of plant extracts. i hope Dr. may guide us if we will be able to secure agreement with him.
- last but not least, will try to ease the financial pressure on family (wherever it is feasible to do)
Note: i was wrong about solvent losses in soxhlet - put rubber glove onto condenser output and noticed absence of pressure there. The problem with positive pressure (observed before) was due to increased temperature of water circulating in condenser. Right now, there is 15 liters plastic tank, and water is meant to be cooled through its walls which is found to be inefficient. Adding ice to the water is ok, but that means the process needs attendance from time to time which is not i am after.
We might expect some loss when unloading powder from soxhlet (but i got an idea to solve as well)
But the main problem is cycle absence and most probably it is caused by cotton that clogged soxhlet outlet. I plan to use stainless mesh or washer made of ptfe populated with holes next time between soxhlet bottom and cotton to ease solvent flow.
All these (may be unnecessary) detail are put here in hope those will be helpful for someone who needs this.
Kind Regards
Asaf
Hi Asaf,
Thank you so much for sharing the details. Indeed, I am sure will help some people, so it's best to put the details down. Actually, that is how I started this website too. Working for my wife and realising the details may help others too.
Kind regards,
Daniel
