Company founded on probiotic for renal health branches out with prebiotic offering

05-Mar-2018 - Last updated on 05-Mar-2018 at 19:02 GMT

Kibow Biotech, an R&D company founded on a novel probiotic that claims to deal with high uric acid levels, has extended its product offerings with a general probiotic supplement and most recently a multi-fiber prebiotic.

The prebiotic product, called Kibow Fortis, is a proprietary combination of two different beta glucans, inulin, XOS and arabinogalactan. The company is marketing the product for its ability to promote the growth of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species as well as:

Supporting a healthy immune system
Managing healthy cholesterol levels
Keeping weight in check
Limiting hunger cravings.

The product joins two other recent offerings, called Flora, a general gut health multi-strain of probiotics, and a product called Azodyl, a probiotic/prebiotic product aimed at the renal health of dogs.

Kibow Biotech started more than 20 years ago as a research spinout from the University of Pennsylvania, where founder Natarajan Raganathan, PhD, did his post doctoral work.

The company has spent more than the past decade bringing its novel foundational product—Renadyl—to market. This is a combination of proprietary probiotic strains cultured under propreitary conditions that Raganathan says preferentially feed on uremic toxins. The idea is to use the vast surface area of the gut—equal to that of a tennis court—as a subsidiary kidney of sorts. The company says it has a number of patents on the technology in the US, Europe and India.

“The concept is when the kidney fails, the toxins increase in the blood, and your blood flows all over your body, but the largest amount of blood flow is in your bowel,” Raganathan said. His first idea, which he started on more than a decade ago on an NIS grant, was to genetically modify probiotic organisms for this task, but that approach ran into both technical and regulatory difficulties.

“We turned around and screened various naturally occurring microbes and found some that can use these toxins,” Raganathan said. “These are naturally occurring microbes and we found out that some of these microbes had a greater capacity to utilize the uremic toxins if you grow them under proprietary conditions, or what we call uremic conditions.”