WACKER Confers Innovation Award for Development of CAVACURMIN®
Munich / Burghausen, Oct 11, 2019
Munich-based chemical group WACKER has conferred the Alexander Wacker Innovation Award on Rachela Mohr and Dr. Helmut Reuscher for developing CAVACURMIN®. The dietary supplement contains curcumin, an extract from turmeric, complexed with cyclodextrins. It therefore exhibits excellent dispersibility properties, which means it can be absorbed and used by the body much faster than competing products. The €10,000 award was presented yesterday at this year’s “WACKER Innovation Days” research symposium in Burghausen.
WACKER is among the most research-intensive companies in the chemical sector. In 2018 alone, the Group invested €165 million and thus around 3.3 percent of its sales in research and development, and registered 87 inventions for patents.
Since 2006, WACKER has been presenting the Alexander Wacker Innovation Prize annually to highlight the importance of R&D in the company and to honor the employees working in this field. Named after the company’s founder, the award has now been conferred for the 14th time. This year, 71 colleagues from the USA, Russia, China, Brazil, India and Germany competed for the award.
Rachela Mohr and Dr. Helmut Reuscher were able to convince the specialist jury of 15 with their project. “Health and fitness are very much on trend at the moment, as growing numbers of people around the world adopt a healthier lifestyle,” said Dr. Christian Hartel, WACKER’s Executive Board member responsible for R&D, at the award ceremony. “The combination of cyclodextrins and curcumin is an innovative approach to plant-based dietary supplements. CAVACURMIN® is the result of years of research. Curcumin can help people of all age groups lead a healthy lifestyle.”
Curcumin, the biologically active constituent in turmeric, is a powerful antioxidant that has been shown to exhibit anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. However, as it is not water-soluble, it is not readily absorbed in the human bloodstream. “To improve this, we use a trick by complexing curcumin extract with our cyclodextrins,” explains Rachela Mohr, who is responsible for marketing bioactive ingredients at WACKER.
Cyclodextrins are ring-shaped sugar molecules that WACKER bioengineers via enzymatic degradation from the starch-containing raw material corn. In CAVACURMIN®, gammadextrins encapsulate the curcumin. The cyclodextrin’s exterior shell is hydrophilic, i.e. drawn to water. The complex is therefore water soluble and can be much more readily absorbed by the body. A clinical study shows that the bioavailability was able to be enhanced by a factor of 40 compared to conventional curcumin extracts.
“The importance of high bioavailability in dietary supplements is on the rise among our customers. We are very proud that our innovative cyclodextrin platform is finding more widespread use and allows us to make a contribution to the development of enhanced dietary supplements,” said Dr. Helmut Reuscher, who developed CAVACURMIN®.
WACKER’s CAVACURMIN® is a free-flowing, dispersible powder and so can be processed not only to dry or powdered dietary supplements, such as tablets, capsules and energy bars, but also to functional beverages.
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CAVACURMIN® Kapseln
Inclusion in gammadextrin makes a hard-to-dissolve substance such as curcumin up to 40 times more absorbable by the human body, as shown in a recent clinical study. As a free-flowing powder, CAVACURMIN® is ideal for use in tablets, capsules, energy bars and beverages.
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