Experts Introduce Particle Engineering and Size Reduction

Experts Introduce Particle Engineering and Size Reduction

Advanced Powder Dynamics offers cutting-edge particle engineering and size reduction technologies that enhance product stability and bioavailability without degrading active ingredients. Their dynamic atomization technology reduces particle size in under one second, preserving ingredient potency while achieving precise control over size distribution, temperature, and kinetic energy. The company’s cyclodextrin inclusion technology increases shelf life and bioavailability by 4x, protecting sensitive compounds from environmental degradation.

Particle engineering is critical for industries requiring precise powder characteristics, from pharmaceuticals to nutraceuticals. Advanced Powder Dynamics combines proprietary atomization techniques with cyclodextrin encapsulation to deliver superior product performance. Their solutions address common challenges like inconsistent particle size, moisture sensitivity, and poor dissolution rates that plague traditional methods.

This discussion covers the science behind dynamic atomization, the benefits of cyclodextrin encapsulation, and how to select the right particle engineering partner. We’ll explore real-world applications, including microencapsulation and controlled-release formulations, to help you optimize product quality and consumer satisfaction.

You’ll gain actionable insights into selecting technologies that ensure consistent particle size, low moisture content, and controlled delivery—key factors for product performance and market success.

By Hendrik Grobler, Stephen Enloe, Ulli Lindau and Will West | Advanced Powder Dynamics

TL;DR – Quick Summary

Advanced Powder Dynamics offers innovative particle engineering and size reduction technologies that enhance product stability and bioavailability without degrading active ingredients.

Heat-Free Reduction: Dynamic atomization technology reduces particle size without heat damage, ensuring high-quality products with retained ingredient potency.

Precise Particle Control: For optimal particle size distribution, Advanced Powder Dynamics provides precise control over atomization, temperature, and kinetic energy, enhancing dissolution rates and bioavailability.

Shelf Life Extension: The company’s cyclodextrin inclusion technology increases shelf life by 4x and bioavailability by 4x, protecting sensitive actives from moisture, oxygen, and light.

Controlled Delivery System: Tesseract Life Sciences’ patented delivery system ensures controlled opening of cyclodextrins, delivering molecules directly to the microbiome for maximum efficacy.

Microencapsulation Protection: Dynamic atomization supports microencapsulation with polysaccharides, liposomal formulations, and complex formulations, providing robust protection for heat-sensitive compounds.

Pro tip: When selecting a particle engineering partner, prioritize technologies that offer consistent particle size, low moisture content, and controlled delivery to ensure product performance and consumer satisfaction.

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Introduction to Particle Engineering and Size Reduction

Stephen: Hi guys! Thank you for coming back for another conversation that we’re going to be having about the particle engineering and size reduction technologies here at Advanced Powder Dynamics. We have a handful of questions that we’re just going to go through today from different perspectives. I know we did this last time, but I think it was useful if you guys just want to introduce yourselves and just say what your title is here as well as what you do so that we can have an idea of where your perspective is coming from. then I think that that is a really nice way to start. Will, do you want to start again?

Will: Sure, thank you, Stephen. Will West, co-founder and CEO of Tesseract Life Sciences, which owns advanced powder dynamics and various other entities within our ecosystem.

Hendrik: Good morning, Stephen. My name is Hendrik Grobler and I am a technical sales and business development here at Advanced Power Dynamics in Payson, Arizona.

Ulli: And hi, my name is Uli Lindauer. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Tesseract Life Sciences. I oversee marketing for the Umbrella Company as well as the three entities we are operating as individual companies. oversee marketing as everything is marketing and marketing is everything. So I’m the famous Jack of all trades.

Stephen: And I really do like the way that the perspectives that you guys give plays out We’ve got the more on the business ownership side We’ve got on the very technical side and we’ve got kind of how it plays out to the to the public. So Without further ado, let’s get into the first question that gets a bit technical to start so The first question we have today is what particle size reduction methods work best for heat sensitive compounds without degrading the active ingredients?

Hendrik: Yeah, that’s a very common question that we’ve been asked by our customers. Although there are different particle size reduction technologies out there, like for example, mulling, grinding, modernizing, and then conventional spray drying, the technology that should be investigated is the one that’s most applicable for your specific application. If you’re looking at requirements for sensitive products prone to heat scorching, you have to find the technology that gives you the ability to produce a quality product. You have advanced power dynamics. We have a completely different approach towards atomization. We have a unique process. It’s a very gentle but very effective way to atomize the product. We don’t use pressurized nozzles. We don’t use rotary discs. We don’t use pressurized feed pumps. So we don’t have any mechanical shear on the product. And because our efficient atomization technology dries the product very quickly, so in less than one second, we don’t have that extended exposure to heat and that gives us the ability to dry a product very efficiently but very quickly. So there’s no residence time, the product is not exposed to temperature and this gives us a high quality product that is not exposed to the temperature and gives you the retain of the ingredient.

Will: Yeah, Stephen, just to add to what what Hendrik is saying, there’s there’s a term that I had to create when talking to other CEOs and management teams about how we go about this to help them comprehend the value of drawing particles in a certain way. And the way I’ve described it is thermal brevity. Unlike other drying methods, we expose things to intense heat. but for an extremely short amount of time. And the value of that brief exposure to the intense thermal system is that we do not damage the particle while we’re doing that. And so it’s very unusual drawing approach, but not only do you have to find the right drawing system for. the ultimate use of the particle, you have to make sure that what you’re doing is tailoring the drying approach, but also making sure that when you’re done, that particle has survived in a way that’s going to make it optimal for the application in the market. And that’s what management teams really need to be concerned about.

Optimizing Particle Size for Improved Bioavailability

Stephen: Hmm, that’s interesting. So moving on from that question, we have the next one that I think is somewhat similar or in the same realm of things. But it’s how do I determine the optimal particle size distribution for my powder to improve dissolution rates and bioavailability?

Hendrik: There’s some serious background noise there. Steven, thank you for that question. The general rule here is the smaller the particle, the bigger the relative surface area is. The bigger that is, the more solubility of dissolution you have. At the same time, moisture content plays a big role. Those two aspects you have to have very precise control over. How do we create that particle size distribution? We have very exact and precise control over the atomization and the temperature and the kinetic energy that we provide to the rider product.

Stephen: And I guess Will, when you’re talking to people about the actual, like this question itself, how do you see this play out within the actual usability or the viability of the product?

Will: They certainly care about the ability to configure the particle. think once you get the particle in the market, they care about a number of additional factors, which is how consistent is that product in the market month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year. That’s where the consumer gets involved with the consumer’s opinion. And the last thing a CEO or a CFO or sales staff wants is a consumer telling them that. the product is not performing the way it did the last time they bought the product. And so it’s very important for a technical engineer, project engineer, an R&D department to make sure they’re asking questions of their partners about how they’re going to be sure that not only does the particle perform, but each particle is consistent. So they need a bell curve that’s very narrow, very predictable, meets their specifications. but also is exactly the same every time they go through a campaign to produce those particles, whether they’re producing them every week, every month, once a quarter, et cetera. And there are some production methods that are gonna be able to do both of those things, others that are very poor in doing both of those things. And so they have to ask those questions of their partners. Spray drawing, not always consistent, but there are ways to tweak the process. But you will often still have things that fall too far out of the sweet spot of the bell curve to be usable, depending upon what you’re looking for, whether it’s solubility or particle size, etc. And other things that are very predictable and very tightly controlled.

You know, we’ve often cited the technology that we pioneer and that we perfect and use, which is a dynamic atomization, because it performs well in both of those. Some clients don’t need that. If you can tolerate an unpredictable particle size, very broad bell curve in campaigns that are not necessarily consistent, you can get away with a lot of different types of drying, but you have to know where you’re headed and whether or not you need something in the market that’s going to conform to very strict standards time and again, and whether or not your marketplace downstream and your channel and your supply chain are going to be able to tolerate those variations as well.

Consistency and Quality in Nutraceutical Products

Stephen: Yeah. And Uli, when you’re taking a look at these different clients’ campaigns that they’re putting out, and as well as when you guys are actually communicating this to the customer, do you see that just consistency in the quality of product actually making a difference in what ends up getting communicated? I feel like that’s a value add that can be communicated, but do you see that actually being utilized in the marketing of these products?

Ulli: Yeah, I think it is used in the marketing of these products, but at the same time, I also think that there is a consumer or customer expectation that there is consistency. I feel that consumers are very sophisticated and they don’t expect a lot of variation. They expect consistency and consistent performance in the product every time they use it. And so I don’t think. It’s nice to have, I think it’s a mandatory price of entry to be competitive, sustainably competitive over time in the marketplace. What you do see is that companies do communicate that their product has the highest standards of consistency, highest standards of quality. And so I do think there is a promise to the consumer that it continues to perform at the same level.

Will: Yeah, and there’s one very important thing to add here, Stephen, and I’ll take a category that is rigorously regulated despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, which is the nutraceutical space. People think that nutraceuticals, vitamins, minerals, supplements are not regulated or lightly regulated. because they tend to compare it to how the FDA handles the pharmaceutical space. The truth is that supplements, nutraceuticals, are very heavily regulated. It’s just that those standards are handled by various players in the industry in anticipation of the repercussions of what happens if they fall outside the guidelines and then get audited, as opposed to going through stage gate process before those products are actually released to the market. In that space, people have to meet label claims. And the example I’ll use is potency analysis. You can put out a product that is spray dried and still meet potency claims. That does not mean that the particles of that active ingredient in the bottle that you’ve purchased are at all soluble. They’re at all usable biologically. by the consumer, that they’re consistent batch to batch, that they’re gonna perform in the consumer the way the brand advertises, the way the consumer wants, even the way the manufacturer thinks they might or should or would want them to. And it’s, not suggesting that it’s because of any ill will on the part of the players in the supply chain, it’s just the reality of the mechanisms of manufacturing in many cases. And so even with testing to examine the potency of the product does not mean that the particles are going to perform to an optimum level.

And so really good pre-release technical analysis and strategy on the part of brands can go a long way to making what are truly considered excellent products. But a lot of work goes into it and the selection of the right partners is a key part of that. The right technology. the right ingredient selection. Many things that go into the particle engineering at the very front end makes a big difference in what the consumer gets at the back end. Regardless of what the label says, regardless of the potency analysis, there’s a lot to it at the particle level. And what we always try to do is engineer quality into every single particle. But there are a lot of things that can go wrong if companies, brands, individuals in the process don’t know what they’re looking for.

Techniques for Enhancing Product Stability and Shelf Life

Stephen: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think that’s a really responsible way of looking at the process, especially when you’re doing this for other brands. It’s a really intentional way of going about it. So moving on to the next question here, what are the latest particle engineering techniques that can advance the stability and the shelf life of my powdered products?

Hendrik: So obviously stability and shelf life is critical, important in our markets, nutraceutical products and dietary supplements. Directly related to that are aspects like moisture content and preserving the nutrient in the product. And there are different technologies out there that approaches these challenges. For example, there are conventional spray drying. Again, there’s mulling, there’s liposomal. different delivery formulations for spray drying. And at the end of the day, the most important factor that you have to consider is how will your technology preserve that nutrient and manage the moisture content in the product? Those are the things that will enhance the stability and the shelf life. The quicker you dry the particle itself, the less water you will retain in the particle, the more robust the particle is, so the more stable it is. And obviously, if you can manage the moisture content and you can manage the water activity in the particle, that will extend your shelf life. Our technology, again, through dynamic atomization, addressed all of these challenges that we have with regards to mechanical shear, heat scorching and quick drying that addresses these issues. We don’t have, again, we don’t have any pressurized nozzles. We don’t have any rotary discs. We basically feed the product through an open pipe into an atomization zone where we efficiently and effectively atomize the product through what we call process air. that provides the kinetic and heat energy to atomize the product in less than one second. So low mechanical shear, no pressure or low pressure, no heat scorching, and that gives you a product that you can successfully introduce into the market with high stability, low moisture content, and extended shelf life.

Stephen: Will or Uli, did you have anything to add to that question? I mean that that seemed pretty thorough, but that’s.

Will: Yeah, I think, you know, Hendrik speaks to a number of the salient issues. We often get asked a lot of questions about alternative methods of product creation, which is a broader question than just the drying component. There are a lot of techniques that go into engineering ingredients, for example, and delivering those ingredients and comparisons between. cyclodextrin inclusions on the one hand, which Hendrik mentioned, and liposomal technologies one another. Liposomal is a great technology. It gets used very frequently for a reason. And there it really comes down to the application. It won’t necessarily give you an extended shelf life. it won’t necessarily give you a very high, very emphasized high level of absorption compared to cYplid ExtraInclusion, but it will elevate your level of bioavailability compared to many raw material ingredients initially. And so it’s definitely a step up. But again, it really comes back to the application. So I’d encourage brands who are looking at different alternatives to consider all the factors in the products they’re trying to create. Drawing is an important one. Shelf life is another one. The application is another one. Where do they need to get the ingredient in the body of the patient, the consumer, the pet, if they’re looking at the pet market, and consider all of these factors because they all weigh heavily on an ultimate decision.

Microencapsulation for Protecting Sensitive Actives

Stephen: That makes total sense. So moving on from that to the next question. We’re just blowing through these questions today, So the next question that we have is, how can microencapsulations through spray drying protect my sensitive actives from moisture, oxygen, and light exposure?

Hendrik: In general, would say that conventional spray drying itself cannot protect your particle. You need additional technology to support that. And that is basically focused on encapsulation technology. And what encapsulation technology can support your drying and atomization technology. If it cannot, then you cannot produce that specific product. Again, dynamic atomization supports basically the three main formulation or encapsulation, micro-encapsulation technologies out there, which is the use of polysaccharides, liposomal formulations, and then the third one is psychedelics and complex formulations. We are experts in all three of these different formulation or microencapsulation technologies. If you require or if you have products with very sensitive to heat scorching, for example, you have to encapsulate that with a wall agent or with a carrier agent and your atomization technology needs to support that. Again, because we don’t have pressurized nozzles or we don’t have rotary discs, we feed high viscosity and high charge concentration products into our atomization zone and we can atomize this very effectively without damaging the microencapsulated formulation.

Will: Yeah, I think one of the things you have to consider here, if your goal is to protect the active, the best thing you can do is put the most rigorous protection around it, the most durable protection around it, which is one of the reasons why tesseract, in my example, has really leveraged cyclodextrin inclusions. The others all serve their purpose. The others that Hendrik mentioned all serve their purpose. We have pioneered a delivery system based on cyclodextrin for a number of reasons, but just to explain how they protect the molecule, which is the question here, imagine a baseball and a baseball glove. So when you do a reaction for a cyclodextrin inclusion, you’re literally taking this cavity and it’s open on the top, it’s open on the bottom, but it’s cone-shaped. and you’re trapping usually one molecule individually inside this cavity. if you can imagine then you basically tighten that cavity around the molecule and it’s very hard for that molecule to escape. But what you’re doing is by surrounding that molecule you’re limiting the exposure to light, you’re limiting the exposure to oxygen, and you can take then the most volatile molecules and help manage them giving it extreme shelf life and we’ve got tremendous examples of that in the library of 450 plus molecules that we’ve already worked with and that’s growing every week such that you know, something like puteric acid, was the first molecule that we commercialized, typically would have three to six months shelf life as an active ingredient, you know, in its native form. And we have still, I’ve got the first couple bottles that came off our production line in 2017. It’s extraordinary how long, you know, that lasts with a very modest degradation in potency.

When you use cyclodextrin inclusions with. particularly our dynamic atomization technology. It doesn’t work if you’re spray drying because spray drying cannot control the moisture levels and in particular the water activity inside that cyclodextrin. It’s essential and very difficult to get the water out of the inside of the cyclodextrin when you’re doing this process. That’s what leads to the protection and the extended shelf life. But that package of the molecule protected by the surrounding is what’s essential. And so, I mean, maybe one example would be an right? The chocolate inside an is going to last longer once you put that candy coating on the outside. you know, in a very simplistic way, that’s essentially what the cyclodextrin does. It gives you a protection for that molecule. So I think even the layman can understand what value that provides. and the cyclodextrins are very durable.

Cyclodextrin Inclusions and Bioavailability

Stephen: Yeah, and I think that the thing that comes up from like an outside point of view, obviously somebody who doesn’t know the science around it so heavily, is how does that affect the biodiversity or bioavailability? There we go, that’s the word.

Will: availability.

Stephen: bioavailability and I think you touched on that in terms of the potency as well which that’s impressive that that can so heavily increase the shelf life while only slightly affecting that aspect of it if I’m understanding correctly.

Will: That’s right. Yeah, and I will joke here and say that I love the challenge of getting the chocolate out of the and I’m pretty good at it, but let me explain how it works with the molecule and the cyclodextrin. There’s plenty of research that shows generally you get about a 4x improvement in bioavailability when you use the cyclodextrin inclusion. But there reasons why it’s not higher. and it has to do with the way the body functions and what the cyclodextrin needs to open up and give up that molecule. The limitations in the body are what’s called amylase. Amylase is an enzyme and it appears in two locations. It’s in our saliva and it’s excreted from a duodenum right at the beginning of the small intestine. If you take a capsule or you swallow a tablet, and those capsules or tablets have a powder based on a cyclodextrin inclusion, you need that amylase to open up all of those cyclodextrins. But when you swallow a capsule or a tablet, you’re not getting the amylase from your saliva because it’s bypassing your mouth going right down your throat into your stomach. And you’re only getting amylase from the duodenum if you’re taking those products with food, because that’s when the duodenum. gives off amylase. And so if you’re not getting amylase from your saliva or from the duodenum, you’re dependent upon those cyclodextrins opening on their own, which they don’t really do. So in studies, we see about a 4x improvement in the bioavailability because we’re only getting a portion of those cyclodextrins open. What.

Tesseract is pioneered thanks to the brilliance of Al Czap who a lot of people in the industry and around the world know because he was the pioneer behind Thorn and owner CEO for 25 years almost before he sold it. He figured out how to actually control those cyclodextrons with a gatekeeper and some other things in our full delivery system so that we could actually manage the timing and the location when a gatekeeper went to work to open those cyclodextrons so we weren’t dependent upon the body. And so unlike using a cyclodextrin on its own and hoping the body opens more than a fraction of them, our delivery system. make sure that we control the opening of those cyclodextrins so we get a vast proportion, I’d love to say 100%, but things can always go wrong. But we get those cyclodextrins open, we pull out the individual molecules, and when the molecule of butyric acid comes out, it’s approximately 35 nanometers in size, that’s billionths of a meter. it’s so small that when it gets presented to the wall of the gastrointestinal system, the small intestine or the large intestine, it’s immediately prepared to slip through the 200-denometer opening in that epithelial layer of the gut and just go right into your body or be consumed in the gut, especially in the large intestine, where we need it to fuel hundreds of processes. And so… It’s a perfect method for delivery and in fact it’s the only method that will get a nutrient delivered in the microbiome if you want to use a cyclodextrin which is the best method to deliver molecules in an optimum way.

And so it’s an extraordinary opportunity to deliver hundreds and eventually thousands of molecules to the microbiome but we can’t leave it to the human body which has an imperfect method. of opening those cyclodextrins.

Stephen: Yeah, wow, that is so interesting to just think about. The explanation of that was really easy to understand, which is wild for how complex of a process that is.

Will: It’s a complex process in the body which fails and what Al and Tesseract have done is we’ve taken the complexity out of it with an elegantly simple patented delivery system that honestly because we’re able to deliver each individual molecule one by one collectively by the billions in those capsules will never be superseded as a delivery method.

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