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- Title
EXTRACTION OF ACTIVE INGREDIENTS FROM MEDICINAL CANNABIS.
- Authors
Vasileva, Tanja; Angelovska, Bistra
- Abstract
Profound knowledge and comprehension of medical history of cannabis is necessary for its integration in the modern clinical practices. There is a recognized and verified usage of cannabis in the past. People consumed this plant and developed practices and various methods of growing for improvement of the pharmaceutical properties and features of the plant. The perception of the value and potential of cannabis changes all over the world today. Thanks to research efforts on the chemical features of cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system, medical cannabis is obtaining a lot of attention from patients, pharmacists, doctors, and government regulators. Due to its bioactive compounds, medical cannabis is well known after its numerous therapeutic activities, which can be proved in preclinical and clinical studies. These new researches provided evidence for the efficacy and safety of medical cannabis in the treatment of various illnesses, by using extracts with known concentration of cannabinoids. Researches for cannabis are concentrated on the methods for development and extraction of new products and because of that, the industry for cannabis increases rapidly. The most appropriate procedure for obtaining the medical product should be chosen in accordance with the characteristics of the desired product. In this paper, we will present the two most common methods of extracting cannabinoids from medical cannabis; we will analyze their advantages and disadvantages. There are several procedures for extracting cannabinoids from medical cannabis. Two of these procedures for the extraction of the medical cannabis are distinguished. To achieve the set goal, we made a review of relevant literary sources of recent published papers, extraction protocols, we have analyzed them, and we have compared the data and made appropriate conclusions. The first one is a conventional method for extraction with organic solvent. This type of extraction involves the maceration of plant material in an organic solvent. In order to concentrate the extract the solvent is removed under reduced pressure. The main disadvantage of this type of extractions is the change in the chemical structures of the active components due to usage of high temperatures. The increasing of the yield of this type of extraction can be improved by ultrasound or microwave treatment. The second innovative extraction method is supercritical extraction. The conditions under which this type of pressure and temperature extraction occurs are responsible for the solubility and selectivity of various plants in the supercritical extraction. Carbon dioxide is used as a supercritical solver because of its safety and reasonable cost. Carbon dioxide provides non-oxidizing atmosphere and consequently prevents the destruction of the extracts. Temperature, pressure, pretreatment of the herb and the nature of the solvent are parameters, which should be taken care of and should be taken into account as the most important in the extraction process. The extraction is successful with optimal solubility of the active components in the appropriate solvent. The active components are necessary to be available and able to interact with the solvent. Cannabis extracts are obtained from the flowers. The plant material prior to the extraction process is exposed to various procedures including the moisture control procedure in the plant material, which concentrates the fragments of the plant containing the active ingredients and increases the contact surface between the solvent and the active ingredients. Both conventional organic solvent extraction and supercritical carbon dioxide extraction have their own advantages and disadvantages, but the list of advantages of supercritical carbon dioxide extraction is greater and hence this type of extraction for extracting cannabinoids from medical cannabis is of first choice recently.
- Subjects
HISTORY of medicine; CANNABINOIDS; CARBON dioxide; PHARMACISTS
- Publication
Knowledge: International Journal, 2023, Vol 56, Issue 3, p291
- ISSN
2545-4439
- Publication type
Article