Two former Johnson & Johnson executives teamed up in 2020 to bring their experience in consumer medical products to the CBD industry and create products that are more efficient and effective. The company’s water-soluble technology claims to be 400 per cent more bioavailable than standard oils.
Dr Gerry McNally, former head of consumer healthcare at Johnson & Johnson and John McDonagh, former head of worldwide marketing, joined forces in 2020 to show the CBD industry that there is one thing it is not paying enough attention to – bioavailability.
McDonagh kicked off his career at Johnson & Johnson straight out of university, initially working in the finance department before turning his attention to the marketing of medications like Tylenol, ammonium, Motrin and Pepcid AC. There was a common thread between these medicines. Consumers wanted to be assured of the evidence and data behind the medicine they were taking so they could be taken with full confidence. This is the missing link that McDonagh and McNally saw in the burgeoning CBD supplement industry. Too many products on the market lacked the evidence backing the formulations and too few companies were prioritising bioavailability.
“It’s not just about the ingredient, It’s really [about] how the formulation makes the ingredient accessible to the body,” McDonagh told Cannabis Wealth. “We really want to take that research, the science behind it and the technical parts of formulating quality products, and that’s what we’re really trying to do at NextEvo. There’s a lot of commonality there between my background at Johnson & Johnson and [our] work at NextEvo.”
After leaving Johnson & Johnson in 2018, McDonagh worked with a fund that looked at both cannabis and hemp investments in the wellness and lifestyle space. When he delved deeper into the industry, he found that most products on the market were likely not delivering the therapeutic benefits they were claiming to.
“We really couldn’t find anyone who was addressing some of the key issues with CBD which is the bioavailability issue,” he said. “The management teams of these companies just didn’t have the experience in consumer products like I did at Johnson & Johnson and Gerry did with his research and development background.”
Identifying a gap in the market, the pair joined forces to launch NextEvo and its trademarked technology SmartSorb, a water-soluble 5 per cent CBD concentration liquid that claims to improve bioavailability by 400 percent compared to standard oil-soluble products.
CBD is a highly lipophilic substance, meaning it dissolves particularly well in oil. This is why the majority of CBD products on the market use oil-based formulations. It’s cheaper and generally requires less time, money and expertise to produce. The issue with a lipophilic molecule like CBD, however, is that it does not absorb well in the digestive tract resulting in only a small proportion of the molecule reaching the bloodstream. CBD is also highly metabolised. According to McDonagh, most oils will get “chewed up” by the liver resulting in a bioavailability level of just 5 to 10 percent in most products.
A water-soluble emulsifier like SmartSorb differs in that it can mostly bypass the digestive system and is believed to instead be taken up by the lymphatic system, a network of vessels, organs and tissues that process an average of 20 litres of blood every day. The result is an absorption rate four times greater than that seen in standard oil-based formulations, NexEvo claims.
Preliminary studies from the company also show that water-soluble CBD products are absorbed much quicker than oils and tinctures. In one pharmacokinetic study carried out by NextEvo, SmartSorb reached its maximum concentration within one hour while in oil-based products the research team only recorded signs of uptake between 90 minutes and two hours. So, if water-soluble products appear to be more effective than oil-based, why are they not the norm?
“Most of the products we see in the market are oil-based products, in large part because they’re relatively inexpensive and easily accessible to the market,” Mcdonagh said.
“Maybe the balance of products will shift from oil base to water-soluble at some point in the future. But I think right now, you have a lot of companies that are really just looking at the margins that they can get from some of these poorly formulated products and I think, unfortunately, that’s driving a lot of current trends.”
Due to the complexity of the technology, not all water-soluble products are going to offer the enhanced bioavailability they claim to. For example, McDonagh is sceptical of companies claiming to use nano-technology to break down the particle size of CBD so it can be more easily formulated into a water-soluble emulsifier.
“Nano is kind of a false term in the category. Many people use the term nano when it really just means that they shrunk the size of the molecule,” McDonagh explained. “We don’t know if that’s really the magic key with CBD. We have seen instances where the molecule can actually be too small and so you might get a quick uptake of the product into your bloodstream, but you won’t get a sustained and overall [greater] absorption level.”
The technology behind SmartSorb was developed by one of NextEvo’s technology partners based in Colorado. With 30 years of experience in R&D at Johnson & Johnson and 32 patents under his belt, Gerry McNally took the technology and adapted it into a number of formulations including capsules and gummies.
Although water-soluble technology is still relatively rare in the world of CBD, it is a well-established formulation in the pharmaceutical industry. “It’s not so much a mystery how to make a water-soluble ingredient,” McDonagh said. The challenge lies in making the product consistent and specific.
“The difference here ensuring a couple of things,” he explained. “One is [ensuring] the particle size is the right size to maximise absorption. It’s also about selecting the emulsifiers. We’ve tested different emulsifiers to achieve the results that we have. And then there’s another element which is what we call the fingerprint of the emulsion which makes sure that each particle is emulsified correctly.”
“What Gerry and I really stand for is making sure that we’re making products that are science-based and high quality,” McDonagh added. “The reason we’re doing that is because we have the consumer in mind first; that’s who we’re formulating for. Our approach is to bring quality products and it’s more expensive and it’s more timely and it takes more investment to do that, [but] we want to do things the right way.”
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