Unigen and Weider collaborate over supplements
Salt Lake City based Weider Nutrition - a manufacturer of vitamins,
nutritional and sports nutrition products - to develop and
commercialize dietary supplement products.
The two companies plan to merge their expertise to create a health and mobility product, which as Regan Miles executive vice president at Unigen explained, will be aimed at the over 45s.
"Unigen's scientific expertise in the development of natural ingredients will facilitate our development of innovative products," said Dr Luke Bucci, Weider's vice president of research. " We want to develop and market products that have the potential to positively affect the health of millions."
Last month, Unigen announced it was to work with a University of Panama research centre to identify lead plant-derived compounds that could be used in pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, cosmeceutical and functional food products.
The company signed an agreement with the university's School of Pharmacy and Center for Pharmacognostic Research on Panamanian Flora (CIFLORPAN) to collect plants that have documented ethnomedicinal uses by native tribes. Unigen will apply natural product chemistry and high throughput screening to fractionate the Panamanian plant extracts, which will be further tested in its laboratory.
The project is expected to significantly expand Unigen's PhytoLogix ethnomedicinal plant library that currently includes more than 3,000 medicinal plants, over 5,000 plant extracts and 200,000 fractions and compounds.
