EXTRACTION OF ACTIVE INGREDIENTS FROM MEDICINAL CANNABIS

Abstract

Profound knowledge and comprehension of medical history of cannabis is necessary for its integration in
the modern clinical practices. There is a recognized and verified usage of cannabis in the past. People consumed this
plant and developed practices and various methods of growing for improvement of the pharmaceutical properties
and features of the plant. The perception of the value and potential of cannabis changes all over the world today.
Thanks to research efforts on the chemical features of cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system, medical
cannabis is obtaining a lot of attention from patients, pharmacists, doctors, and government regulators. Due to its
bioactive compounds, medical cannabis is well known after its numerous therapeutic activities, which can be proved
in preclinical and clinical studies. These new researches provided evidence for the efficacy and safety of medical
cannabis in the treatment of various illnesses, by using extracts with known concentration of cannabinoids.
Researches for cannabis are concentrated on the methods for development and extraction of new products and
because of that, the industry for cannabis increases rapidly. The most appropriate procedure for obtaining the
medical product should be chosen in accordance with the characteristics of the desired product. In this paper, we
will present the two most common methods of extracting cannabinoids from medical cannabis; we will analyze their
advantages and disadvantages. There are several procedures for extracting cannabinoids from medical cannabis.
Two of these procedures for the extraction of the medical cannabis are distinguished. To achieve the set goal, we
made a review of relevant literary sources of recent published papers, extraction protocols, we have analyzed them,
and we have compared the data and made appropriate conclusions. The first one is a conventional method for
extraction with organic solvent. This type of extraction involves the maceration of plant material in an organic
solvent. In order to concentrate the extract the solvent is removed under reduced pressure. The main disadvantage of
this type of extractions is the change in the chemical structures of the active components due to usage of high
temperatures. The increasing of the yield of this type of extraction can be improved by ultrasound or microwave
treatment. The second innovative extraction method is supercritical extraction. The conditions under which this type
of pressure and temperature extraction occurs are responsible for the solubility and selectivity of various plants in
the supercritical extraction. Carbon dioxide is used as a supercritical solver because of its safety and reasonable cost.
Carbon dioxide provides non-oxidizing atmosphere and consequently prevents the destruction of the extracts.
Temperature, pressure, pretreatment of the herb and the nature of the solvent are parameters, which should be taken
care of and should be taken into account as the most important in the extraction process. The extraction is successful
with optimal solubility of the active components in the appropriate solvent. The active components are necessary to
be available and able to interact with the solvent. Cannabis extracts are obtained from the flowers. The plant
material prior to the extraction process is exposed to various procedures including the moisture control procedure in
the plant material, which concentrates the fragments of the plant containing the active ingredients and increases the
contact surface between the solvent and the active ingredients. Both conventional organic solvent extraction and
supercritical carbon dioxide extraction have their own advantages and disadvantages, but the list of advantages of
supercritical carbon dioxide extraction is greater and hence this type of extraction for extracting cannabinoids from
medical cannabis is of first choice recently.