What does it mean that all Illustre Essenza® products are Chirally Correct®?
The word chiral comes from the Greek word kheir, which means hand. Notice that each of your hands is basically a mirror image of the other. Like our hands, molecules (including those that make up pharmaceuticals) also have two sides. One side has positive, healthy effects on our bodies; the other side has negative, damaging effects. (Just as you wouldn’t be able to wear your left glove on your right hand, your body can’t use both sides of a molecule.) Unfortunately, the scientific process of splitting apart the two sides of a molecule – called chiral separation – is expensive and complicated. But the failure to separate the healthy side of molecules from the unhealthy side has tragic consequences, like the birth defects from Thalidomide 40 years ago. Fortunately, in the last 15 years, drug manufacturers have begun separating the two sides of each molecule to isolate the healthy side, and are even re-formulating old non-chiral drugs to improve their effectiveness and safety. Just as chi
