1. Italy’s Life120 hit with mega-fine for making false claims
Italy’s Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) came down hard on Life120 this week, hitting the lifestyle firm with over €500,000 in fines after the company was found guilty of making false claims and employing ‘non-transparent’ methods in promoting its food supplement range.
The AGCM alleged that these supplements were presented as a method to gain beneficial or even curative effects against serious illnesses such as Alzheimer's – all asserted without any scientific basis.
“This is a particularly insidious practice,” said the AGCM in a statement. “It disorients the consumer, preventing them from making informed decisions of information promoting certain goods and/or services. The case is all the more serious as it relates to health issues.”
2. Nuritas builds scientific advisory board
The Dublin-based start-up has formed a new scientific advisory board (SAB), including Justin Siegel, Ph.D., David Chernoff, M.D., J Bruce German, Ph.D. and Luke O’Neill, Ph.D.
The four-year-old biotech company uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with DNA analysis to predict, unlock and validate peptides from natural sources. It gained funding from Irish rock legends Bono and The Edge in December 2016 and gained a further €16 million in its first round of funding through Cultivian Sandbox Ventures in December last year.
Commenting on its new SAB Emmet Browne, chief executive officer at Nuritas (and a former ex-Nestle regional president), said: “We are delighted to have attracted some of the world’s leading experts in drug discovery, metabolism, immunology, food for health, proteomics and molecular diagnostics to support Nuritas as we advance our AI platform and bioactive peptide discovery to address the world’s growing healthcare needs.
“The formation of our SAB serves to further strengthen Nuritas’s unique approach to discover peptide-based therapies with unmatched speed and accuracy.”
Nuritas announced a partnership with Nestlé earlier this year, with the Swiss food giant saying it would develop and validate the efficacy of Nuritas’ discoveries within target application areas.
Nuritas can reportedly identify bioactive peptides ten times faster and 500 times more accurately than traditional discovery methods.
3. From waste product to probiotic beverage
On the innovation front, our Asian edition reported that scientists from the National University of Singapore have developed a patented fermentation process to turn a waste by-product of tofu and soy milk production into a probiotic-rich functional beverage.
The soybean pulp byproduct, also called okara, and is typically discarded, or used as animal feed, compost or fertilizer. The NUS scientists have developed a process using enzymes, probiotics and yeast to make okara more palatable and therefore, more useful.
The process also allows the beverage to be stored at room temperature for up to six weeks while still retaining high counts of live probiotics, according to the scientists.
Associate Professor Liu Shao Quan, from the NUS Faculty of Science's Food Science and Technology Programme, said: “The unique combination of the probiotics and the yeast helps the probiotics to survive, and to extend the shelf life of the drink, even without refrigeration.”