The newly opened Centre for Applied Research and Innovation at Sofia University gives 25 young scientists each semester the opportunity to create applied innovations in the fields of medicine and healthy nutrition.
Over the past year, the young scientist Valentin Tsochev, together with the team of the Centre at Sofia University, discovered that the combination of the antioxidant found in red wine and the good bacterium found in Bulgarian pickles helps normalise cholesterol and blood pressure after just 3 months of use.
- I am very excited that my colleagues and I have managed to find a way to help people with cardiovascular problems, such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure, not with medicines that have side effects and condemn them to long-term dependence, but with purely natural products. If we think back to the beginning of the 20th century, Bulgaria had 6 times more centenarians per capita than America, because people consumed clean foods. In a sense, our Bulgarian bacterium found in pickles, as well as the antioxidant of red wine, were part of the traditional Bulgarian table. Today, the innovation from the Centre for Applied Research at Sofia University has its roots precisely in these Bulgarian traditions. The principle is the same, because each tablet contains 75 mg of trans-resveratrol (the antioxidant that can be extracted from approximately 50 bottles of red wine) and one billion lactic acid bacteria with beneficial properties, concentrated from one litre of pickle juice.
The innovative Bulgarian company "ProViotic" began working with the young scientist Valentin Tsochev and, since September this year, has started producing his innovation in the form of tablets as a food supplement. "ProViotic" is already conducting a human study on people with high blood pressure and high levels of bad cholesterol.
The company believes that the power of old Bulgarian recipes has great potential for solving many health problems without any other side effects. Modern science offers additional advantages in extracting the good ingredients, and removing the bad ones, from these Bulgarian traditions. For example, to take in such a high amount of the antioxidant of red wine, one would have to drink 50 bottles of red wine in a single day, which is impossible in itself, whereas now a single alcohol-free tablet can deliver the same amounts of the beneficial ingredient. "ProViotic" works together with scientists from Harvard and Nobel laureates such as Prof. Barry Marshall, and reckons that this type of innovation can be a competitive product on all of its existing markets, including the USA, Canada, France, England and Japan.