Background
The Novogen Isoflavonoid Technology Platform has been created to offer a fresh and practical approach to the challenge of finding effective and safe therapies for the major degenerative diseases and disorders facing modern communities. The basis of this technology platform are naturally-occurring plant compounds known as 'flavonoids'. Flavonoids (also known as polyphenols) are Nature's biological regulators. They are the dominant bio-regulators in the plant kingdom, helping to regulate such basic survival functions as how a plant cell grows, divides, survives, and relates to its neighbouring cells. The Novogen Technology Platform grew from the understanding that plant cells and human cells are little different in the mechanisms within the cell that control such basic behaviour as growth and survival. The differences between a plant cell and a human cell are far less than might be imagined, with evolution preserving most of the fundamental control mechanisms. Given this commonality between plant and human cells, it is not surprising that flavonoids demonstrate the ability to regulate the same basic functions of human cells (that is, how they grow, divide and survive) as they do in plant cells.
Click here to discover more about the science of flavonoids (Appendix 1)
The importance of flavonoids to human health
Flavonoids are just as a significant part of human life as they are of plant life. Humans are exposed to considerable amounts of flavonoids on a daily basis because flavonoids are present in all plants (fruits, vegetables, cereals) that we eat. The average person eats about 200-300 mg of flavonoids each day and the majority of these are readily absorbed into the blood. That means that the average person has very large amounts of plant flavonoids circulating in their blood on a constant basis. Given what we know about the action of flavonoids on human cells, it is inconceivable that the large amounts of flavonoids in human blood from birth throughout life would not be contributing in a significant way to human health. This is the fundamental concept behind the Novogen Technology Platform - that plant flavonoids play a key role as bio-regulators in humans, and that their main role is to prevent the onset of degenerative disease processes by helping to regulate how human cells age. The basis of this regulation is now understood. It is through the 'signal transduction mechanisms' in cells - mechanisms that are responsible for passing signals from the cell's control box (the DNA) to the rest of the cell.
Click here to discover more about signal transduction mechanisms. (Appendix 2)
Isoflavonoid Technology Platform
Novogen has sought to build on this naturally occurring, disease fighting mechanism by identifying the most powerful flavonoids in Nature. This search led Novogen to the most biologically potent group flavonoids - a group of plant substances known as isoflavones. Isoflavones are widely found in plants, but are found particularly in plants known as legumes. Legumes are plants that can fix nitrogen from the soil and convert it into protein. Legumes are an important source of protein for many communities. Commonly used legumes are chick peas, lentils, soy beans etc.Isoflavones were selected by Novogen for the development of therapeutic products for two reasons. First, the isoflavones were the most potent bio-regulators of human cells of all the flavonoid family, suggesting that they had the most promise in terms of preventing degenerative disease. Second, the isoflavones also were estrogenic, suggesting that they had promise in terms of preventing degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis that are associated with estrogen-deficiency. Novogen has spent many years unravelling the secrets of the flavonoid/isoflavonoid control mechanism in the human body. Our understanding has advanced to the point where a pipeline of consumer health products and prescription drugs has been developed that Novogen believes have the potential to meet the needs of a wide range of major community health problems. These studies have created a considerable amount of intellectual property and scientific understanding that has created the Novogen Technology Platform. This platform has developed along two separate but closely related pathways as explained below.
The Novogen Technology Platform - Consumer health products
An important aspect of the platform is the identification of suitable naturally occurring plant isoflavones that would provide important health benefits to both men and women. There are over 1000 isoflavones known in plants and not all are biologically active or appropriate to be used as health products in humans. The Novogen task was to identify key isoflavones that would provide significant biological effects on the function of tissues such as bone, heart, prostate and breast. This has been achieved, along with the refinement of understanding the appropriate combinations of isoflavones to achieve maximum health benefit. This has led to the development of three products that provide dietary supplementation of four important isoflavones and are intended to maintain normal function of various parts of the body.
The Novogen Technology Platform - Prescription drugs
The second part of the technology platform is a refinement of the first part. This relates to an understanding of how to manipulate the basic isoflavone molecule to obtain new compounds with even greater biological potency compared to the original plant isoflavone. This has involved Novogen scientists in designing new compounds and then synthesising them in the laboratory. These new compounds are known as 'isoflavonoids' and Novogen has created an extensive collection of these new compounds which is referred to as the Novogen isoflavonoid library. The Company plan is to bring to market over the next decade a series of products drawn from this isoflavonoid library that it anticipates will make a significant contribution to the prevention and treatment of a wide range of common degenerative disorders such as cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel diseases (ulcerative colitis, Crohn's Disease). These are all disorders for which medicine currently has few effective therapeutic options.
