Low-temperature plasma wall breaking technology to achieve efficient extraction of natural pharmaceutical active ingredients

This entrepreneurial project is a wall-breaking process that uses VUV (Vacuum Ultraviolet) generated by collision plasma to chemically bond substances. It efficiently breaks down natural medicines including ganoderma spore powder, pine pollen, and wolfberry to promote the dissolution of active components in cells. Improve the efficiency of using these natural medicines. This technology is rarely reported at home and abroad.

A low-temperature plasma is a high-energy substance aggregate state, which contains a large number of active particles such as electrons, ions, excited atoms, molecules, photons, and free radicals. The principle of the vacuum ultraviolet plasma wall breaking technology used in this project is to break the chemical bonds on the cell surface through the action of VUV, resulting in surface modification, and prompting the cell wall to rupture in a short time, and finally to improve the intracellular activity Dissolution of the fraction.

This project will focus on the research and development of the industrialization of Ganoderma spore powder, pine pollen and wolfberry. These three types of natural medicines have clear active ingredients and efficacy, large amounts, and many manufacturers. This creates a good external environment for the transformation of the results of this innovative technology. The low-temperature plasma wall-breaking biotechnology has a high wall-breaking rate, a large amount of primary treatment, short time, low cost, and environmental protection. Therefore, relying on this project can produce high social and economic benefits and meet certain market needs.

The key technologies and innovations adopted in this project are as follows:

(1) With independent intellectual property rights: The company has independent intellectual property rights in the research and development and production of plasma wall breaking technology and plasma processing equipment. Currently has 2 invention patents, of which 1 US patent (shared property rights) has been authorized; 1 Chinese patent (exclusive to the company) is in the announcement period. They are: Control system of full-automatic cold plasma seed processor (US9782740B2), cold plasma treatment of plant seeds (CN106612743A),

(2) Expected industrialization: The company currently has two independently developed plasma processing pilot equipment with a processing capacity of up to 5 kg; after several processing tests, the production results are stable and can be manufactured at any time. -50kg-class processing equipment can fully realize industrialization;

(3) Innovation: As a new type of photochemical biophysical dynamics wall breaking method, the low temperature plasma wall breaking technology uses the energy of VUV to break the chemical bonds on the cell surface, leading to the breaking of cell bonds. Compared with traditional mechanical wall breaking, ultrasonic wall breaking and freeze-thaw wall breaking, it has obvious technical advantages.

(4) Technical advantages: The low-temperature plasma wall-breaking technology has a high cell-breaking rate, a large processing capacity, short time, low cost, and environmental protection.

The key technology of this project has applied for 2 invention patents, including 1 authorized invention patent.

The company is one of the very few technology companies that have successfully achieved high-efficiency wall breaking of natural medicines by using low-temperature plasma treatment technology. It has great advantages in the development of plasma treatment technology and equipment. On the basis of the previous period, through the input of registered capital and other funds, an annual output value of 50 million yuan and an annual profit and tax of 7 to 10 million yuan will be realized after five years.

The company's goal is to become a technology-based enterprise with advanced science and technology, excellent service, customer satisfaction, and well-known domestic and foreign natural medicine deep processing. The company will continue to develop high value-added biological products, improve production technology, and gradually form its core competitiveness Lay the foundation for the company's later development.

Natural medicines (such as ganoderma spores, wolfberry, pine pollen, etc.) contain a large number of biologically active components (such as polysaccharides, saponins, and flavones, etc.), which have significant effects in terms of antioxidant, antitumor, antiviral, and immune regulation . Since the beginning of the 21st century, global health consumption has increased year by year, and the demand for nutritional health products is very strong, growing at a rate of 13% each year. At present, China has promoted "Healthy China" as a development strategy. In the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan", it is clear that the future sales target of health products is two trillion yuan, and plans to actively cultivate top 100 enterprises (the relevant expressions are from the State Council on Notice of the National 13th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Strategic Emerging Industries (Guo Fa [2016] No. 67) was issued. Taking ganoderma spore powder as an example, the domestic production in 2016 was about 4,900 tons, and the demand was about 4,600 tons. These spore powder raw materials are mainly used as powders for oral or further processing to extract natural active ingredients such as Ganoderma lucidum polysaccharides and Ganoderma triterpenes, with a total output value of 1.68 billion US dollars (data from the industry research report of China Research & Development Co., Ltd.), with considerable economic and social benefits. However, due to the protection of the cell wall, the active substances in these cells are difficult to dissolve. Experiments have shown that wall-broken cells can greatly increase the release of active substances. For example, when taking Ganoderma spore powder without breaking the wall, only about 12% of the active ingredients can be absorbed by the human body, and the absorption rate of the broken wall is more than 95%. Therefore, wall breaking has become a key factor in whether intracellular bioactive substances can be effectively absorbed by the human body or can be extracted as much as possible during deep processing.

At present, the main methods of wall breaking include mechanical crushing, repeated freezing and thawing, ultrasonic crushing, microwave crushing, enzymolysis and combinations thereof. These cell disruption methods have their own characteristics and advantages, but also have their own technical defects. For example, the ultrasonic crushing method has the advantages of high extraction rate, short time, and low-temperature cell disruption. However, due to its high heat generation, ice bath cooling and intermittent ultrasound are usually required to reduce the temperature of the treatment liquid. In addition, the low throughput is also an important factor limiting its large-scale application.

Low temperature plasma wall breaking, as a new type of biophysical wall breaking technology, has incomparable advantages with traditional wall breaking technology. A low-temperature plasma is a high-energy substance aggregate state, which contains a large number of active particles such as electrons, ions, excited atoms, molecules, photons, and free radicals. By the action of VUV, the chemical bonds on the cell surface are broken, resulting in surface modification, and the cell wall is ruptured in a short time, and the dissolution of the active components in the cell is finally achieved. Adopting low-temperature plasma wall breaking technology, the cell wall breaking rate is high, the primary treatment capacity is large, the time is short, the cost is low, and the environment is green, so it has broad application prospects.

So far, the company has obtained a US authorized patent (US 9782740B2) in the research and development of low temperature plasma processing equipment, which can be used for the wall breaking treatment of plants and microbial cells. Through in-depth research on the treatment process, the company has successfully achieved efficient wall breaking treatment of wolfberry, pine pollen and ganoderma spore powder. Taking Ganoderma lucidum spore powder as an example, under the optimal wall breaking process conditions, the dissolution rate of crude polysaccharide is as high as 5.8%, which is much higher than the marketed 3.5-4.0% of the wall breaking spore powder. Therefore, the wall-breaking spore powder processed by this technology has significantly improved its nutritional value, and the market value for powder oral or deep processing is huge.

In addition, the cost advantage of using low-temperature plasma technology to break walls is obvious. Taking a ganoderma spore powder produced by a health care company in Shandong as an example, the factory price of untreated ganoderma spore powder is about 100 yuan / kg, and after the wall treatment, the factory price rises to about 300 yuan / jin. According to our calculations, the cost of processing Ganoderma spore powder using low-temperature plasma technology is only 30 yuan / kg. It can be seen that the cost advantage of this entrepreneurial project is obvious.

The company will add 1 million new investment plans for the research and development of broken walls of other types of natural medicines and the deep processing of active ingredients, as well as the expansion and transformation of plasma processing equipment to meet scientific research purposes and production needs. The goal of the startup is to use the advantages of cold plasma processing technology to modify living organisms and biological materials, and carry out research and development of biomedicine in order to create greater social and economic benefits.