How the Tecton Ketone Behaves in the Body After I Consume It
When considering whether to consume an exogenous ketone, most people want to understand how it will raise their blood ketone levels and for how long.
This kind of question is answered by doing what’s called a pharmacokinetics study (PK, for short). This is done by giving a known dose of the ketone to human beings, taking blood samples repeatedly over a period of time (often zero to 12, or 24 hours), and analyzing that blood for ketones at each time point.
What Does a PK Study Measure?
When conducting a PK test, there are a few measurements to consider.
These are:
What else can a PK study tell us?
Rate of Absorption: This is a measure of how quickly a molecule can enter the bloodstream after it is given. This is usually represented by the portion of the curve up to the Cmax.
Rate of Elimination: This is a measure of how quickly a molecule is metabolized and is no longer circulating within the body.
Tecton’s PK Study with the Mayo Clinic
Tecton conducted its own PK study on its ketone product. Blood was drawn from the study participants at 9 different time points over 12 hours, during a single day. The first blood sample was taken before any ketone was consumed, so that there was a baseline measure of ketones.
After ingestion of the ketone blood samples were taken at regular intervals of time throughout the 12 hours. The participants were fasting during the test, so there would be no dietary interference. Once all the blood samples were collected, they were sent frozen to the Mayo Clinic Metabolomics Core Laboratory for biochemical analysis.
What We Learned
You can see the PK graph below showing the rise of ketones in the blood, the level of ketones attained in the blood, and the slow removal of ketones from the blood. This is a standard PK graph, but this specific graph shows how the BHB behaved in our test participants. One thing to note is the difference between the curves for free ketone and total ketone.
Tecton vs other Ketones
Tecton has not done its own head-to-head PK comparison with other products on the market. But some other products have published their own PK studies, using the same types of measurements used in our PK study above.
This allows Tecton to make a rough comparison with other products (noting that the participants and the study conditions may not be fully comparable). Note below the Tecton study of a 25-gram dose of its ketone product in humans.
Since the dosing in the Tecton product was not the same as in the competitor product, we convert the dose to a standard of milligrams of product per kilogram of body weight (mg/kg). In other words, it took three times as much of the competitors ketone ester for them to reach the 2.27mM level of blood ketones.
We achieved above 2.5mM with 125mg/kg of body weight. The competitors only reached 0.3mM at 125mg/kg of body weight. This conversion allows for a better comparison. When this measure is used the Tecton ketone product delivers a higher maximum concentration than this specific competitor product.
Because of the structure of the Tecton ketone, we deliver two forms of ketones. One is called free, which means it is readily available for rapid use. The other is called ‘bound,’ which means some of the BHB is linked to its glycerol backbone and available for later use. As we look at this distinction within Figure 1, a few things can be noted.
The BHB-glycerol circulates longer up to a point in time where there is a low amount of free ketone. After this occurs, between 2-3 hours, we are able to see that there is conversion of this molecule into additional free BHB. There becomes a graduated curve vs a steady downward decline of BHB.
This extends the amount of time BHB is circulating in the blood and increases the concentration of free BHB. This allows for the rate of elimination of free BHB to be impacted differently than exogenous salts of BHB and other ketogenic esters.
Difference between a ketostick vs blood plasma results
Mechanistic – the blood ketone meter can only measure the free or non-conjugated BHB in the bloodstream. It cannot measure the bound, or conjugated (linked together) BHB.
Tecton GTB (Glycerol Tributyrate) contains an equal distribution of 1 monoglycerides and 2 monoglycerides.
The majority of the 1 monoglycerides are absorbed intact and the remaining portion is absorbed with the free BHB as it flows through the bloodstream. The conjugated BHB is processed at the brush border of the small intestines by lipases or at the terminal cells which will utilize it. These will not show up on the blood ketone meter until broken down by the lipases.
Laboratory testing can measure both non-conjugated BHB (free), by measuring the BHB in the plasma, then the conjugated (bound), by cleaving the bound BHB from the blood with lipases, thereby getting the total BHB. Contact us for more information.
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