March 17, 2014

BIOBANK CO.,LTD. (Okayama, Japan) and instructor Tomohiro Ito Ph.D. from the Department of Fisheries, Faculty of Agriculture at Kinki University (Nara, Japan) have conducted a collaborative research and discovered the fact that the fermented vegetable extract (product name: OM-X^®) is helpful to suppress type I allergy through experiments with cells and animals. 

According to the findings of the survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2011, about one in two Japanese has some sort of allergies. Allergies are categorized from types I to V depending on differences in the mechanism of action. Type I allergy is referred to as immediate-type allergy and its typical symptoms include hay fever, atopic dermatitis and bronchial asthma. There are many ongoing studies regarding the relief of symptoms related to type I allergy. Some studies suggested that natural botanical ingredients like polyphenols that are extracted from seaweeds and teas, including phlorotannin and catechin, are helpful to symptomatic relief allergies.

BIOBANK CO.,LTD. develops, manufactures and sales dietary supplements, skin care products and a soil amendment for agricultural use based on the fermented vegetable extract OM-X^® that is a combination of vegetables, fruits and seaweeds fermented with probiotic strains. We focused on its functionality for human consumption and conducted the collaborative research with instructor Tomohiro Ito Ph.D. from Kinki University. This study showed the fact that OM-X^® is helpful to suppress type I allergies. OM-X^® includes antioxidative components like melanoidin and polyphenols. It has inhibited degranulation of rat basophilic leukemia cells (RBL-2H) which are a model of phenomenon of type I allergy and suppressed the inflammation resulting from type I allergy based on the experiment on passive cutaneous anaphylaxis (PCA) reaction using model mice. The current result encourages us to expect OM-X^® to be a helpful food/material for symptomatic relief of type I allergies.