Research and development at Pranarôm is the beating heart of the laboratory. Since its inception, it is here that both the solid foundation of product quality and the future of Pranarôm's therapeutic ranges are at play.
Pubmed, the largest scientific article search engine in the world, lists more than 25,000 studies conducted on or with essential oils. 90% of them are less than 20 years old. Scientific research on aromatherapy is experiencing explosive growth and brings new evidence of its effectiveness every day, or new directions to find promising solutions to sometimes very complex health issues, such as cancer treatment or bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Pranarôm is one of the pioneers in essential oil research. Abdesselam Zhiri, research director at Pranarôm, recalls: "In the 1990s, there was a lack of evidence for the therapeutic, clinical, and pharmacological activities of essential oils." To be credible, we gave ourselves all the means to scientifically prove the action of essential oils, in terms of their biological properties and therapeutic indications.
There is no shortage of areas to work on. Pranarôm has one of the most comprehensive databases on scientific research related to essential oils and aromatherapy:
50,000 scientific publications, over a thousand synthesis works and manuals, encyclopedias of traditional herbal medicines, the main standards, and current norms.
The laboratory is developing partnerships and more than forty collaborations with the scientific and academic community. It launches numerous research projects and supervises theses. Pranarôm is interested in numerous subjects:
Pranarôm also conducts extensive research on the toxicity of essential oils to ensure their safe use, going so far as to establish genetic toxicity tests in collaboration with Spanish, French, and Moroccan universities.
Beyond human health, Pranarôm's research also focuses on animal health, and even on agronomy and agriculture, in partnership with companies in the agrobiotechnology sector, to find environmentally friendly alternatives to standard herbicides and pesticides.
The staggering figures on the publication counter and ongoing research on essential oils are mixed with a palpable enthusiasm from the researchers.
Pascal Debauche, PhD in science, notes, for example, the rapid and "astonishingly easy" action of Tea Tree oil on H1N1, "at a concentration of 0.0006%," he specifies, "and it's not even the most powerful!"
Dominique Baudoux cites recent work in antibiotic therapy: the combination of an antibiotic and an essential oil has defeated resistant bacteria. "We should not be overly surprised by a future reality involving a Nobel Prize awarded to a research team working with essential oils," he predicts.
In this stimulating context, Pranarôm continues its daily quest for new applications of its products and publishes the results of its work in renowned international journals, to keep helping as many patients as possible.
