Four-Source Oral Iron Delivery Combined with Natural Vitamin C-Rich Cofactors: Formulation Design, Absorption Performance, and Preclinical Repletion of an NVTIA Iron Supplement

Abstract

Background: Oral iron preparations often fail to balance rapid dissolution, complementary uptake routes, storage stability, and gastrointestinal tolerability. In this study, we evaluated an NVTIA four-source oral iron platform that combines heme iron, glycine chelated iron, ferrous gluconate, and ferrous lactate with camu camu and acerola-derived natural vitamin C-rich cofactors. Methods: We organized the formulation dataset and preclinical evaluation program of this platform and interpreted the results together with published evidence on global anemia burden, oral iron transport, amino acid-chelated iron, heme iron, and ascorbic acid-assisted absorption. The disclosed in-house evaluation included accelerated stability, in vitro dissolution, rat in situ intestinal perfusion, and a rat iron-deficiency anemia model. Results: Publicly available evidence confirms that anemia remains a major global problem and that ferrous salts, heme iron, amino acid-chelated iron, and vitamin C each contribute distinct absorption advantages. In our formulation study, vitamin C retention after 6 months of accelerated storage was 93.25% in Embodiment 1 versus 65.17% in the synthetic vitamin C substitution comparator. Cumulative ferrous dissolution reached 98.26% at 60 min, intestinal iron absorption reached 38.72%, and 28-day repletion in iron-deficient rats brought hemoglobin and serum ferritin closer to normal values than the comparator systems. Conclusion: A multi-pathway iron-delivery strategy that integrates complementary iron species with natural vitamin C-rich cofactors produced favorable stability, dissolution, absorption, and repletion profiles. These findings support clinical translation of the NVTIA platform while underscoring the need for prospective human validation.