Ingredient company ADM and bioactives company Brightseed announced a global joint partnership to develop evidence-based functional synbiotic products that target microbiome optimization.
The partnership allows ADM to leverage Brightseed’s artificial intelligence platform, Forager, to decipher the molecular interactions between dietary plants and gut microbes, and their potential impact on human health.
“ADM has a vast microbial library and came to Brightseed to understand Forager's capacity to predict bioactives through microbe and plant interactions. Although Forager was initially trained on plant life and human biology, it was impressively accurate when we included the complex layer of microbes,” explained Sofia Elizondo, co-founder and COO, Brightseed.
“ADM's advanced understanding of the untapped potential of natural compounds, combined with their vast microbial libraries, is the sum total expertise that will redefine the future of ingredients to promote a healthy microbiome,” she added.
Partnership is key in today’s world of hyper-personalization
Elizondo told NutraIngredients-USA that Brightseed exists to bring bioactives forward and make them accessible to the food, beverage and nutrition industries so they can meet growing consumer demand for targeted and personalized health solutions. By forming an alliance, the companies can meet this demand by combining forces to accelerate the discovery process.
“Partnerships are the cornerstone for enabling monumental leaps in research, discovery, and product innovation. We are seeing proactive health and food-as-medicine being championed on the national policy front, and the downstream impact will result in disruptive market shifts and demand for better solutions. Through Brightseed’s own bioactives ingredients and in partnership with others, we are translating our discoveries into science-backed products to nimbly respond to those shifts. With global leaders like ADM, we have even greater potential to unlock health for millions of people around the world,” Elizondo said.
Product development in the works
In many ways, this is a new chapter for Forager and Brightseed, Elizondo said. “ADM is a leader in ingredient research and discovery, and with this partnership, Brightseed is expanding its capability into decoding microbes, offering a more expansive and richer library of bioactives to investigate for human health outcomes.”
Without getting into details, Elizondo said the companies are in the early stages of developing synbiotic products that target microbiome optimization.
Aside from developing and commercializing synbiotic products, Elizondo said ADM and Brightseed are performing groundbreaking work together to advance the scientific understanding about the gut microbiome.
“That’s where we’re training Forager to understand and predict the dynamic interplay between the molecules in plants and various microbial species. We’re anticipating many possibilities to spin out of the process in this collaboration, and to build from those insights,” she said.
