Liposomal delivery is a proven way to enhance bioavailability, but only if it’s done to rigid specifications, a noted supplier maintains. 

Years of experimentation have yielded a process that’s both reliable and verifiable, says Sebastian Balcombe, CEO and founder of Virginia-based liposomal ingredient supplier Specnova. 

“We focused a ton of our time in the past six or seven years on liposomal validation, qualification and performance studies,” Balcombe told Natural Products Insider during an interview at the recent SupplySide West trade show in Las Vegas.  

[For the complete video interview, click on the video, above.] 

Poor bioavailability is a widely known problem within the natural products field.  To get efficacious dosages of some hard-to-absorb ingredients (polyphenolic ingredients are a primary example), formulators are forced to put more in the capsule with the hope that the fraction that gets through will be enough.   

Working with body’s uptake mechanism 

Ingredient suppliers can also take other tacks, such as nanosizing particles to increase their surface area.  But that still leaves bioactives exposed to the harsh acidic environment of the stomach. 

Enter liposomes. This approach uses a phospholipid coating to protect delicate bioactives from stomach acids. It also works with the body’s absorption mechanisms in the gut. While the approach obviously adds cost, less of the ingredient may be needed to achieve similar blood levels of the bioactive in question. 

Not all liposomes are created equal 

Balcombe said that while there are many such products on the market, not all of them stand up to detailed scrutiny. 

When comparing his company’s liposomes to other approaches, Balcombe said some of the others did not perform any better than a standard USP reference for ingredient uptake based on a bioactive without any bioavailability enhancements. 

“To be a true liposome,” said Balcombe, “it has to have at least a single bilayer of phospholipids.” 

Creating that layer is a highly technical process that requires a lot of experience to get right. A lot of that amounts trade secrets, but Balcombe did say that without sufficient expertise, it’s all too easy for the process to go wrong. 

From Specnova’s standpoint, some of the competing ingredients in the market making claims about this kind of delivery are really little more than mixtures of the bioactive and the carrier, with little to no encapsulation having taken place during manufacture. 

To verify its technology, Specnova claims to use various kinds of microscopy to validate that the liposomes are the right size and that there is minimal “debris” in the picture that might indicate vesical failure. 

[To take a deep dive into liposomes—as well as the gamut of delivery formats from gummies to films and clean-label excipients, and the formulation challenges therein—download the free Natural Products Insider digital magazine on the topic here.]