Calendula Flowers (Calendulae officinalis flos): Methods to Obtain Fractions of Biologically Active Substances
Authors: Lukashou R. I. , Gurina N. S. 
Published: October 2024

INTRODUCTION. The pharmaceutical industry aims at developing sustainable resource-saving technologies for manufacturing medicines. Approaches to the effective use of herbal drugs include applying technologies yielding compounds with various pharmacological effects in one production cycle. To date, no standardised herbal drug processing technology has been designed to produce calendula flower-based medicinal products with various pharmacological effects. The Member States of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) process calendula flowers by extraction methods yielding one fraction of biologically active substances per cycle (either only flavonoids or only carotenoids).

AIM. This article aimed to investigate the possibility of stepwise processing of calendula flowers to obtain biologically active substances with different polarities (carotenoids, flavonoids, and polysaccharides) per cycle.

MATERIALS AND METHODS. The authors extracted carotenoids using hexane. The study included additional thermal pretreatment of the herbal drug. Carotenoids and flavonoids were quantified by spectrophotometry, and polysaccharides were quantified by gravimetric analysis. After hexane removal, the dry oily residue was dissolved in oil with mechanical stirring to obtain the oil extract. The study included a three-step processing method that comprised hexane extraction (extraction of carotenoids with a low-polarity organic solvent), extraction with a water–organic solvent system (extraction of flavonoids), and aqueous extraction (precipitation of polysaccharides).

RESULTS. The lipophilic extracts obtained by single hexane extraction or by single hexane extraction and heat treatment had the maximum carotenoid content (~4%), which was 10 times the carotenoid content in the extracts obtained using a water–organic solvent system. Oil extracts were prepared from the dry residue left after removing hexane by distillation at its boiling point. The content of biologically active substances in the oil extracts was comparable to that in the intact herbal drug. Water–organic solvent extraction yielded 68.5% more flavonoids from the herbal drug extracted with hexane than from the intact herbal drug. In contrast, aqueous extraction applied to the intact herbal drug yielded 1.7 times the amount of flavonoids obtained by aqueous extraction preceded by hexane extraction. The water-soluble polysaccharide fraction extracted from the intact herbal drug had 10 times the flavonoid content observed in the fraction extracted from the processed herbal drug. Each subsequent processing step decreased the total polysaccharide content and the content of individual polysaccharide fractions and increased their purity. The ratio of polysaccharide fractions remained unchanged across all processing methods tested.

CONCLUSIONS. Stepwise processing of calendula flowers ensured that one processing cycle provided three fractions containing increased amounts of carotenoids, flavonoids, and polysaccharides. Relative to the intact herbal drug, there was a 3.3-fold increase in the yield of carotenoids, and the yields of flavonoids and polysaccharides increased by 44.8 and 41.3%, respectively. The resulting product had a higher degree of purity than the products obtained by pretreatment and double hexane extraction or by using the intact herbal drug. The stepwise processing method is advisable for the production of medicines that are enriched with a specific group of biologically active substances or contain smaller amounts of impurities.