Here are some of the articles regarding EMU oils capabilities as a transdermal carrier it actually competes with DMSO which is pretty crazy.
[h=2]Penetrating Properties[/h]The Emu Oil Express: It Really Travels
By Nancy McMillan
Emu Today & Tomorrow, September 1995
According to early study indications from Auburn University, in Auburn, Alabama, if you don’t want it to “get under your skin”, don’t mix it with emu oil. Dr. Paul Smith, Professor of Pathobiology at Auburn University, shared some information concerning a study that he is conducting in conjunction with the American Emu Association to determine whether or not emu oil can be used as a transdermal carrier of medicine.
“We had already done a little bit of work in that area, and we were particularly interested in following up one of the characteristics of emu oil. The characteristic that we were most interested in was whether or not emu oil could be used as a carrier of medicine through the skin,” said Dr. Smith.
Dr. Smith explained that the answer to the question, “Can emu oil be a carrier of non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs?” could be of positive significance. Dr. Smith further explained that some drugs, though they are perfectly suited for treating certain conditions, cannot be taken orally and cannot be injected.
“There are many conditions were we would like to use a drug that we can simply put on topically or have carried through the skin,” explained Dr. Smith, “particularly in inflammatory conditions of the skin, arthritis, or similar conditions. Therefore our interest was anti-inflammatory drugs.”
According to Dr. Smith, one of the drugs they anticipated using in the study was the drug Ketoprofen. Dr. Smith explained that Ketoprofen is a drug very much like ibuprofen, a commonly used over-the-counter medication that many people today takes for pain. Although Ketoprofen is a very potent anti-inflammatory, non-steroidal drug, it can cause serious problems such as indigestion, renal dysfunction, fluid retention, and jaundice when taken orally. Therefore, the effort was to determine whether or not Ketoprofen could be carried through the skin via emu oil in an effort to avoid some of the side effects resulting from oral use of Ketoprofen.
“One of the problems with using Ketoprofen is that it is very difficult to solubilize,” stated Dr. Smith. “In order to get the drug into solution we used a product, a kind of alcohol, to dissolve the drug into. The sample of oil that we used was taken from a four year-old male emu. The oil was rendered at a very low heat and stored at four degrees centigrade (39.2 degrees F) for four to six months.
Dr. Smith says that he believes one of the most important points of any kind of research that you do is not so much the principal component that you are investigating, but the kind of controls that you use. In developing groups of controls, Dr. Smith explained that one of the things he wanted to use was a non-oily type carrier of the drug. Therefore, Dr. Smith and his team mixed dimethyl slfoxide (DMSO) and bovine serum with the Ketoprofen drug.
“Another very important control that we use in certain groups was a very heavy mineral oil in which we mixed the drug as well,” commented Dr. Smith.
Dr. Smith explained that the combination of ingredients in the six control groups were as follows:
A. Ketoprofen and the alcohol compound Propanol.
B. Emu oil mixed with the alcohol compound Propanol and Ketoprofen.
C. DMSO in bovine serum and Ketoprofen.
D. Mineral oil and Ketoprofen.
E. DMSO, emu oil, and Ketoprofen.
F. Isopropyl alcohol and Ketoprofen
In addition, Dr. Smith explained that DMSO is a compound that, when topically placed on the skin has demonstrated quick penetration into the skin surface and has been used to carry various kinds of drugs into the blood stream through topical applications.
“The DMSO compound has been on the market for a very long time,” explained Dr. Smith. “For many years it was used very extensively to carry medication through the skin into the bloodstream, joint, or ligament. However, there have been some problems with its use, and the FDA is not highly in favor of the use of the compound as a medicinal carrier.”
According to Dr. Smith, for this transdermal study mice were chosen at random. “We had six young adult mice in each of the six groups,” he illustrated. “The mice were caged separately and treated individually, then placed back into the cage. We repeated the treatment six different times throughout the day, every half hour.”
For the treatments, Dr. Smith explained that an area of skin over the back was selected, and the fur was clipped with extremely fine clippers so that the presence of hair would not interfere with the compound.
“In each treatment we simply took each compound and a small syringe and drew up .2mils of the compound, treating each mouse over that area of skin,” explained Dr. Smith. “The compound spread very easily. Although we did not attempt to rub the compound in, we made sure that the compound covered the entire area and returned the mouse back in the cage to be left for a half an hour. We sequentially treated each mouse in each group with the particular compound for that group.”
According to Dr. Smith, blood samples were taken from the tail of the mouse immediately following the treatment. Dr. Smith explained that an area of the mouse’s tail was cleaned with an alcohol swab and a vein in the tail was nicked to collect the samples.
“There are many different ways to collect blood samples but this way is rapid and we wanted to collect the samples as quickly as possible after treatment,” reasoned Dr. Smith. “After the collection we separated the cells from the blood then evaluated the amount of drug in the blood stream, realizing the compound would have been carried through the skin.”
“We used a high pressure liquid chromatograph for the separation process,” continued Dr. Smith. “There are columns that are used within the machine, and a computer read-out is prepared due to a wavelength of light that is passed through the beam of material. The wavelength the gives the blob on a line drawing that is computerized into a graph.”
According to Dr. Smith, instead of a straight line on the graph indicating little or no trace of a drug in the bloodstream, as would normally be found with bovine serum, his research team was excited when the graph showed a definite peak!
According to the results of two of the mice in each group, the amount of drug detected in the mouse serum was surprising,” stated Dr. Smith.
Early test results indicated the amount of Ketoprofen found in the blood stream of the mice are projected as follows:
A. Ketoprofen and Propanol showed six units.
B.
Emu oil, Propanol and Ketoprofen showed around 700 units.
C. DMSO in bovine serum and Ketoprofen showed less than 200.
D. Mineral oil and Ketoprofen showed approximately 300.
E.
DMSO, emu oil, and Ketoprofen showed over 800.
F. Isopropyl alcohol and Ketoprofen showed about 200 plus.
“
Surprisingly enough, there is some good information in a third control group that we had that was only emu oil,” stated Dr. Smith. “We were very impressed with how close the results with straight emu oil and emu oil with DMSO were. Not the difference, but how close the two really were.”
“We are excited about these results,” Dr. Smith continued. “We feel that this bit of information gives us a place from which to work to continue to use anti-inflammatory drugs to be carried through the skin to treat conditions that would be very meaningful, not only in animals but in humans as well, and we are excited about what we are seeing.”
[h=2]Penetration Study[/h]Emu oil at 20 percent concentration in ethanol increased the rate of penetration of methyl nicotinate by 11 percent. Oleic acid at 20 percent concentration in ethanol increased the rate of methyl nicotinate by 22 percent. Oleic acid is a mono-unsaturated fatty acid, while emu oil contains both saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Emu oil contains only 50-60 percent oleic acid with small quantities of linoleic almost equal to the oleic acid rate. A claim for “increases penetration” can be supported by this study.
Excerpt from Emu Cream Assists Lidocaine: Local Anesthetic Absorption through Human Skin
Presented by Dr. William Code
8th AOCS Meeting May 1997
Ratite Oils: Processing and Applications
Lidocaine is probably the most commonly used anesthetic. For those of you with an organic chemistry or biochemistry background, it’s an amide. An amide local anesthetic is a much safer agent to use as it is less likely to cause an allergic reaction. Lidocaine is also reasonable in cost and readily available. It’s the most understood local anesthetic and a prototype in general.
The problem I wanted to address as something to think about is the problem with punctures in the skin or planned-for-needle insertion. The obvious one that comes to mind to an anesthesiologist is to start an intravenous for administering drugs. We want to know in a few seconds whether the anesthetic is working or not.
Vaccination is an interesting example. It’s young people, particularly in the preteen and early teen years that can get very anxious and upset about an injection. If something were available to minimize the trauma, life could be a lot simpler for public health nurses and other personnel.
Suturing of wounds is always a tough consideration – the decision is whether to put the local anesthetic in and make two or three holes, or just go straight ahead and suture with a tiny needle. If you has a relatively sterile entity that could numb it either before the injection with the needle, or with regard to the wound itself, then you might be a lot further ahead.
What we need is something that works quickly, that relatively hypo-allergenic, and it also has consistently good absorption. Of course we need it to be non-toxic and it has to be reasonable in cost. That’s why I tested Lidocaine, and it’s our impression that emu oil is relatively hypo-allergenic.
The emu substance used in this particular pilot study was what I call a cream, the thick version of the refined product versus the clear oil.
What did we test? We created two mixtures that looked, for all intents and purposes to people observing them, the same.
Our substance was emu cream and spearmint oil. We use the spearmint oil for two reasons: the relatively positive scent it imparts to most people and it has the advantage that it may advance absorption as well. Our second preparation was emu cream of the same batch, Canadian emu oil, and spearmint oil with Lidocaine.
Those were then applied to two sites on six people. The two sites were both chosen as the same and that’s in the ventral distal forearm, the part of your wrist which hardly ever has any hair on it. You can start intravenous there. The mixture was applied on both forearms on two-inch square sites, and covered with something called Opsite, Tegaderm, or one of the other proprietary units that are a lot like Saran Wrap™ with a sticky surface around it.
The function of the cover is twofold. First of all, you increase the warmth and moisture in the area and that might make a difference in penetration. Also, it usually permits an increased concentration crossing across the skin before it’s rubbed off or taken away. After twenty minutes, that cover was removed and residual cream was wiped away. The amount of residual cream left is usually diminished over that time frame.
We then did two major tests on the individuals. The common one we used initially was ice. That’s because in my practice in the operating room, I found that if you can check with an ice cube where people can tolerate the ice cube, and not tell the difference whether it’s warm or cold, even prior to Cesarean section, you can invariably tell when they’re going to have sharpness from the incision with the cold hard steel knife. Then, of course, we used pinpricks because most people were kind of intrigued with the idea that this actually made any difference. Because each individual had the substance A or B on the left or right side, they had some way of observing themselves and determining, on their own basis, if they thought there was a difference from one side to the other.
We got fairly simple results in that there was a reduced sensation noted in only one of the two arms, one skin site only. Also, the one with the reduced sensation had been treated with mixture B: the emu cream, the spearmint, and the Lidocaine combination.
[h=2]Carrier Properties[/h]Excerpt from Emu Oil: Can it Give Liposomes a Run for Their Money?
By Beth Silva
Emu Today & Tomorrow, November 1995
Ever since liposomes were discovered by a British scientist in 1961, researchers have theorized that these hollow microscopic spheres formed of thin lipid membranes could be used to encapsulate a drug and transport it through the bloodstream.
Such an achievement could overcome the most daunting problem of pharmaceutical research – how to keep a drug circulating in the body long enough for it to do its work, and at the same time releasing the drug slowly so that it doesn’t damage healthy organs and isn’t expelled by the body’s natural defenses.
Liposomes – self-assembling colloidal particles in which a lipid by-layer encapsulated a fraction of the surrounding aqueous medium – have now successfully negotiated the crucial passage from basic research to clinical practice. In the simpler terms, these hollow fatty spheres which are able to penetrate into the body have the ability to be filled with materials that can be transported throughout the body.
To picture how liposomes work, think of a soap bubble. The outside of the liposome bubble is not made of soap, but of the same materials as cell membranes. That allows the liposome to travel unhindered through the bloodstream toward the disease site – a tumor, say. Inside the bubble is the drug. When the liposome encounters a specific kind of cell, it delivers its payload by releasing bits o the drug at a time. A rapid release of the drug could result in much of it being washed away by the bloodstream.
One of the biggest problems plaguing liposomes has been producing consistent batches that react in a predictable way in the body. Initially, liposomes were heralded as optimal drug carrier systems, but further research proved disappointing and led to a period of skepticism among some scientists in the field of drug delivery.
The expense alone incurred by the medical research done by doctors, drug analysts, and pharmaceutical companies piles up into the millions, yet only a few companies are on the verge of reaching the market and having their drugs approved and recommended by the FDA.
Of concern, also, are the side effects experienced by many patients who try the liposome-encased drugs. Additional studies are still needed to confirm the spheres’ safety and efficacy.
Yet, interest in liposomes as drug carriers was rejuvenated by the introduction of new ideas from membrane biophysics, and this multidisciplinary approach has enhanced prospects for their use in medicine.
A more economical version of the liposome would be hard to imagine at this point, yet there appears to be something that might just give these new spheres a real run for their money: emu oil. Though not yet as thoroughly researched as liposomes, emu oil is proving to have some of the same transdermal qualities of these microscopic fat bubbles.
Dr. Alex Zemtsov, certified dermatologist and presently the Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Indiana University School of Medicine and adjunct Associate Professor of Medical Education at Ball State University, serves as co-editor for Skin Research and Technology journal.
According to Dr. Zemtsov, the most fascinating property of emu oil is that it is highly penetrating. “What I mean by ‘penetrating’ is that it goes through the skin barrier and carries active ingredients into the skin,” says Dr. Zemtsov.
Dr. Zemtsov noted that the most important property would be the penetrating qualities. “Many companies are currently researching and developing liposomes,” related Dr. Zemtsov. He went on to say that obviously a medicated cream will not do much good if the medicine cannot penetrate the skin barrier, and currently a synthetically derived liposome is the key ingredient to aid in penetration and absorption of the skin.
In addition to the penetrating qualities is the relatively low expense of emu oil. One gallon of emu oil might cost a company $300. “The price of liposomes is about 20 times more expensive than emu oil,” relates Dr. Zemtsov.
Dr. Zemtsov is interested in conducting a follow up research on the transdermal qualities of emu oil. “The application of the oil in the cosmetic industry is probably the greatest. The sky is to show that it has good penetrating properties, that you need more studies, and these studies need to be documented,” notes Dr. Zemtsov.
Dr. Margaret C. Craig-Schmidt, associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at Auburn University, has also been researching the qualities of emu oil. Dr. Craig-Schmidt has performed fatty acid analysis on the oil and found that the fatty acid is high in oleic acid.
“Oleic acid is, and has been, used to carry bio-active compounds through the skin, and this is the highest fatty acid found in emu oil,” explains Dr. Craig-Schmidt.
“In other words, the high presence of oleic acid in the emu oil may be one of the reasons that it is able to penetrate the skin to a large degree and at the same time be able to carry active compounds through the skin where they can have an effect on the body,” noted Dr. Craig-Schmidt. “Oleic acid could possibly be a component of a liposome,” she admitted.
Currently, liposomal agents are being researched and tested on patients with everything from AIDS and cancer to tumors and liver disease and are even being researched in conjunction with skin enhancement and revitalization.
Other medical applications that have been studied include the enhancement of x-ray imaging by radiopaque liposomes; heavy-metal toxicity therapy with liposomes containing chelating agents; protection of otherwise digestible dietary supplements and drugs to enable their oral administration; and preparation of artificial blood composed of hemoglobin-loaded liposomes. Technological applications of liposomes have also been the subject of studies.
Though still in the early research stages, emu oil is making great strides as a penetrating carrier for established drugs. Emu oil products are used in diverse applications such as to reduce muscle and joint aches, relief from arthritic pain and stiffness, for incisions, and to reduce healing time.
[h=2]Epidermal Proliferation Study[/h]The application of emu oil on mouse skin for seven consecutive days produced a significant proliferative reaction on the epidermis. Emu oil produces a more normal looking stratum corneum than retinoic acid, which suggests less irritation potential. It was observed that male mice with many dorsal combat bites/wounds healed completely within two days of application of the neat emu oil. This was not eh case with other preparations.
The addition of 0.5 percent vitamin A to emu oil did not enhance the proliferative action. Neat emu oil produced a more intense proliferative than the 20 percent emu oil. It also appears from the histological slides that the emu oil applied neat has a beneficial effect on the papillary dermis. There is an increase in cellularity and density of the papillary dermis. This would support a potential anti-aging effect.
