Introduction to the Problem
According to the World Health Organization, global mortality from infectious and somatic diseases—such as HIV, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, cancer, and heart disease—is on the rise. In 1998 alone, 9.8 million people died from infectious and parasitic diseases in WHO member states. This accounted for nearly half of all deaths in developing countries. A significant portion of this mortality is attributed to three primary infectious diseases: AIDS, TB, and malaria, which together are responsible for over 300 million illnesses and approximately 5 million deaths annually. Cancer added an additional 7.2 million deaths in that same year. These diseases disproportionately affect impoverished populations, who often lack the financial means to access modern pharmaceuticals.
Global Spread and Barriers to Prevention
The increasing prevalence of infectious diseases has become both a national and international security concern. In a world of global air travel, disease outbreaks can no longer be contained by geography. TB, in particular, poses a significant threat; one infected person may transmit the disease to 10–15 others each year. One-third of the global population is currently infected with the TB bacillus, and over the next 20 years, another billion individuals are expected to become infected. Malaria remains a major concern for 40% of the world’s population, killing approximately 1 million people annually. While mosquito control can reduce malaria transmission, sexual transmission of diseases—such as HIV—presents an ongoing global health challenge.
Efforts to promote safer sex practices, including condom use, have seen some success, particularly in developing regions. However, relying on such interventions for long-term prevention may be unrealistic. In the United States, although the introduction of anti-HIV medications reduced AIDS-related deaths, infection rates continued to rise. Public complacency, bolstered by the belief that the epidemic was over, led to a decline in safe sex practices. In some U.S. cities, new HIV infection rates have reached levels comparable to those in South Africa, a country with one of the highest HIV infection rates globally. Currently, an estimated 36 million people are living with HIV, and more than 22 million have died from AIDS. While TB and malaria treatments are available at relatively low cost, many developing nations remain unable to access life-saving medications for cancer or HIV.
Economic Consequences and Global Stability
AIDS, TB, and malaria continue to devastate the developing world. In an era where bioterrorism is a growing concern, the global health divide cannot be ignored. Further widening of healthcare disparities could provoke resentment among the world’s poor, with potentially destabilizing consequences. As economic and social systems collapse under the burden of disease, the search for scapegoats or external blame can emerge—creating fertile ground for acts of retaliation. If these tensions manifest as bioterrorism, the outcome would be catastrophic.
Modern pharmaceutical drugs have significantly alleviated human suffering. However, traditional drug development processes are expensive and time-consuming, often ill-suited for creating low-cost treatments. The people most in need of medication are frequently those least able to afford it. Many pharmaceutical companies have come under scrutiny for refusing to relax patent protections that would allow developing countries to produce generic versions of essential drugs. These companies, often publicly traded, are legally obligated to prioritize shareholder returns. They cannot simply distribute medications for free without risking lawsuits from investors.
This corporate dynamic highlights a disconnect between medical need and pharmaceutical capability. Moreover, the pipeline from drug discovery to market approval can take years, while new pathogens continue to emerge annually. Traditional medicines—especially those derived from plants—have been used for millennia to treat infectious and chronic diseases. They are now increasingly seen as viable alternatives to synthetic drugs. However, serious limitations remain. Dried herbs and powders often vary in composition and can be toxic when improperly used. Over the past decade, renewed scientific interest has led to thousands of studies cataloged in the National Library of Medicine on plant, fungal, and bacterial extracts with therapeutic potential. While many natural compounds show promise, researchers alone cannot convert them into pharmaceutical-grade products. This step remains the domain of the pharmaceutical industry.
Traditional Medicines
For centuries, practitioners in China, Japan, Korea, and other countries have relied on herbs and medicinal plants to treat disease. Although Western medicine acknowledges the potential value of certain plant-based compounds, traditional medicines have often been disregarded—sometimes due to cultural or nationalistic bias. Western medical standards prioritize empirical evidence over tradition. While skepticism is warranted in many cases, tradition and scientific validation are not inherently incompatible.
Challenges with Bioavailability
Most traditional medicines are processed into dried leaves, powders, or pastes rather than fresh extracts. This is understandable, as fresh plant materials degrade over time. However, drying also reduces their medicinal effectiveness. When plant leaves are dried, cells collapse and trap active compounds within the cellulose matrix, making them difficult to digest or absorb. Humans cannot enzymatically break down cellulose, and many medicinal molecules—especially lipids—are not water-soluble. If they are released in the stomach, they may be broken down by digestive enzymes before absorption. Even absorbed compounds may be chemically modified in the liver or intestinal lining and excreted before reaching target tissues. As a result, a drug that is effective in vitro may show no therapeutic benefit in the body. This challenge is well known in pharmaceutical development, where many promising drugs fail due to poor bioavailability.
Plant extracts are inherently complex mixtures of compounds. Often, their therapeutic effects arise from interactions between multiple components rather than from a single active ingredient. While modern drug development emphasizes specificity—targeting individual enzymes or receptors—many natural remedies exhibit broad-spectrum activity. A well-known example is the distinction between COX-1 and COX-2 enzyme inhibitors. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) inhibit both, which can lead to stomach irritation. COX-2-specific inhibitors were developed to address this issue. Nevertheless, natural products may owe their therapeutic effects to multi-target actions—an approach less compatible with conventional regulatory models.
Potency and Recovery of Oil-Based Compounds
Many plant extracts include both oil-soluble and water-soluble compounds. Essential oils, the volatile components responsible for plant aromas, often possess strong antimicrobial properties. Tea Tree Oil, for instance, is known to be effective against a range of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. During World War II, Tea Tree Oil production was so critical that its workers were exempted from military service. However, with the rise of antibiotics, interest in essential oils waned. Today, a renewed focus on antimicrobial resistance has revived interest in these natural products. Unfortunately, dried plant materials no longer contain essential oils, which are lost during the drying process.
The technology described here was specifically developed to retain oil- and water-soluble compounds from plant extracts without subjecting them to heat or denaturation. Traditional methods, such as steam distillation, can degrade many therapeutic molecules. Our proprietary process allows for the simultaneous extraction of oil and water-soluble compounds without heat. The resulting products are formulated into highly stable microemulsions—mixtures in which these incompatible compounds are combined into a uniform and potent solution. Oil-based components are dissolved in carrier oils to extend their half-lives in the body, while water-soluble compounds can be encapsulated into nanometer-scale liposomes. These delivery systems greatly enhance absorption and bioavailability.
Microemulsions can be administered via multiple routes, including orally, topically, nasally, by inhalation, or intravenously.
The Nature of Emulsions
Emulsions are stable mixtures of oil and water-based substances. Milk is a classic example, containing suspended fat globules in water with soluble proteins like casein. Most emulsions are unstable and eventually separate, but the microemulsions developed in this context remain uniformly mixed. Their defining feature is droplet size: less than 0.2 microns in diameter. This small size allows for sterile filtration and makes them suitable for intravenous use.
Conventional oil-based substances must be sterilized via autoclaving before injection—a process that destroys most plant-derived therapeutic compounds. In contrast, these microemulsions are filter-sterilized, allowing natural compounds to be safely introduced into the body without degradation. Although non-sterile extracts can be ingested, oral administration is often inefficient due to poor absorption. Injectable, inhalable, or topical delivery is far more effective—but requires sterility.
Chronic diseases are complex and rarely respond to single-compound therapies. While oil and water-soluble substances could theoretically be administered separately, combining them in a stable microemulsion is far more efficient. These nano-sized droplets can traverse the full capillary network, reaching lymph nodes, internal organs, and even deep tissue within tumors. Their size allows them to evade clearance by the kidneys and liver and to avoid triggering immune responses.
As a result, microemulsions offer a viable delivery platform that enables the full therapeutic potential of plant-derived compounds. They provide a practical, scalable means of harnessing traditional medicines to address global health challenges—especially in contexts where affordability, accessibility, and broad-spectrum efficacy are essential.
Credited to: Stephen Martin, Ph.D
Chief Scientist, Grouppe Kurosawa
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