By Eric Brand

I was reading a rather fascinating piece on binders and excipients the other day that deserves a few comments. I mentioned the link to this paper in a previous blog on a different topic, but I’d like to revisit the central theme of the paper.

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I’ve been methodically reading all the publications I can find from my teacher Prof. Zhao Zhongzhen in Hong Kong; his work is invariably fascinating and academically rigorous. Most of his publications are in Chinese but he has a fair amount of stuff out there in English, and some of it is even available as full-text without a fee or university subscription. This article is available as a free full-text download at this link.

Essentially this article explores the effects of binders and excipients on the absorption of herbal products. Aspirin and baicalin are two active compounds found in natural plant drugs (aspirin comes from white willow bark and baicalin comes from Huang Qin- scutellaria). The speed of dissolution of these active ingredients varied depending on which binders were used, and a variety of traditional Chinese medical products were replicated to study their effects on the dissolution time of these active medicinal compounds.

Honey pills, wax pills, and pills formed with starch paste are all traditional preparations with a history of use in Chinese medicine. This research study assessed the controlled release of baicalin and aspirin when combined with several different binders: processed honey, beeswax, starch paste, and mixtures of honey and beeswax in different ratios. The results are truly fascinating, and they demonstrate that Chinese medicine essentially pioneered the concept of controlled release delivery forms many centuries before they became the focus of modern pharmaceutical science.

If you like reading great scientific material on herbal medicine, definitely check out this article!