NBT AWARDS 2011 WINNER IRB

IRB receives the NBT Most Improved Product Safety and Quality Award 2011

NBT Award
Most Improved Product Safety and Quality

Winning Entry
IRB Echigena PluS™ (Echinacea angustifolia cell culture extract) with Improved Safety and Quality

Video Interview

NBT Editor Kevin Robinson interviews Roberto Dal Toso, R&D Manager, IRB

* Watch it here (mp4) >>
* Watch it here (hi-res wmv) >>

IRB is the winner of the Nutraceutical Business & Technology Awards 2011 for the most improved Product Safety and Quality

IRB Echigena PluS™, the first biotech Echinacea angustifolia extract, wins for the most improved
product safety and quality at NBT Awards 2011 associated with Vitafoods exhibition. Behind this result there is the HTN™ green biotechnology, exclusively owned by IRB, allowing the production of the first and only biotech plant extracts authorized in Europe as food supplements ingredients – substantial equivalence under the novel food regulation - with a superior level of quality and safety and with a dramatically reduced environmental impact.

In fact the main features of all the products obtained by IRB technology are:

• absence of pesticides, heavy metals, aphlatoxins and other environmental pollutants,
• defined, standardized and reproducible composition profile
• unlimited availability
• huge saving of natural resources such as water and land

Together with Most Improved Product Safety and Quality, IRB has also been shortlisted as finalist for
two other categories of Nutraceutical Business & Technology Awards 2011: Environmental
Excellence and Best New Plant/Process/Technology.

The Product

ECHIGENA PluS™ is the only biotech Echinacea angustifolia extract with a defined and standardized
composition profile that guarantees a batch-to-batch reproducible efficacy. Besides a proved antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity, a clinical test performed on endurance athletes has demonstrated that the daily consumption of Echigena PluS™ significantly controls the oxidative stress damage by reducing the plasma liperoxide levels more than 30% after a 30-day treatment. According to Regulation (EC) 258/97 on novel foods and novel food ingredients, the Commission for Nutrition and Dietetics has recognised the “substantial equivalence” of the extracts from plant cell cultures compared with the commercially available and traditional extracts from plants, following the evaluation of the results of a metabolomic phytochemical analysis.

The Problem

Plants have always been the main source of medicinal ingredient for humans, providing a wide range of valuable biologically active substances and even today, nutritional and health sectors use a myriad of active ingredients and products of botanical origin. Despite a number of agricultural and technological improvements in plant cultivation and product manufacturing procedures over the
centuries, the required safety, availability and purity standards of natural ingredients cannot be totally
guaranteed because of the intrinsic nature of the traditional production process itself.

To overcome some of these limitations, an interesting opportunity results from the use of a
biotechnological process based on plant cell cultures: it has not yet been fully developed on an
industrial scale for nutritional applications despite the numerous advantages over conventional
methods. Indeed, plant cell cultures ensure a high degree of quality and safety and serve to improve
reproducibility and standardization in the composition of the final product. These advantages are
clearly present to international food institutions, such as FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization),
which in 1994 endorsed the use of plant cell cultures as a process to produce natural substances as
nutritional ingredients.

HTN™ Technology

IRB is a green biotech company having focused its activity on research, development and
manufacturing of bioactives from plant cell cultures for nutritional and cosmetic applications, using a
biotechnological, innovative, exclusive industrial and eco-sustainable, process called HTN™ (High
Tech Nature). This unique process is capable to physiologically orientate the production of specific
substances, such as phenylpropanoids, involved in defensive responses of the plant against
environmental physical and biological stress.

This is an alternative process to produce food metabolites (eg. plant extracts), with a number of
advantages over open field plant cultivation of plants. An essential issue is the overall ecosustainability
of this process: as an example, Echinacea angustifolia plants, traditionally used as food
supplements, the IRB HTN™ technology can reduce up to 1000 fold water consumption and 400 fold
soil occupation, so that both can be made available for food crops. Furthermore, the use of toxic
substances, such as herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals and other environmental contaminants are
avoided since the culture is grown in sterile antibiotic-free conditions. Another point is that the plant
biomass obtained by fermentation has a simple composition and a high content of the desired
metabolites so relatively simple and efficient extraction procedures are used, thus entailing a much
reduced use of organic solvents with high environmental impact. The environmental benefits of the
HTN™ technology have been officially recognized as the best process/technology and IRB as the
winner of the 2011 Italian Business Award for the Environment.

HTN™ technology also obviates obstacles such as the natural biological cycle of the plant and the
seasonality of the desired material, thereby guaranteeing high availability of the constituents at all
times with no quantitative limits or price variations. Degradation of active ingredients usually occurring
during storage of the botanical material is also greatly reduced as extraction is performed right after
completion of the fermentation cycle with minimal loss of the desired substances. The final result is
thus the production of plant extracts in a rapid and flexible manner, without limitations on quantity and
with a greatly improved safety profile and a highly standardised composition. The technology based on plant cell cultures, fine tuned by IRB, offers a potentially unlimited availability of natural ingredients, even rare or scarcely available, but highly active substances as nutritional supplements with truly significant benefits for both environmental and human wellness.

IRB’s Mission

With its exclusive and eco-sustainable biotechnological processes, IRB's mission is to research, produce and ensure the availability of plant active ingredients with excellent quality standards for dermo-cosmetic, nutritional, zootechnic and pharmaceutical use, being able to shorten the distance to the ideal profile of the active plant ingredient.

This operational philosophy mainly focuses on the following values:

• encouraging and improving the health and wellbeing of end users
• guaranteeing maximum purity, efficacy and safety available on the market
• safeguarding natural resources, the ecological balance and biodiversity

Our innovative philosophy passionately oriented to the excellence:
the quality of active ingredient, the human wellbeing, the eco-sustainability.