Leena Pradhan-Nabzdyk, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Canomiks, a biotech company founded by Harvard professors and scientists that provides scientific validation for the efficacy of its functional ingredients and formulations.
Canomiks started as a service provider, helping nutrition companies develop scientifically-tested formulations and has evolved to become a leader in certifying the biological efficacy of botanical ingredients. Dr. Pradhan-Nabstik said that she and her co-founders aim to bring science-backed functional food and beverage products to the market by leveraging their combined expertise in pharmacology, genomics and bioinformatics.
She also discussed the challenges of biotech, highlighting the need for funding and redundant supply chains.
“During COVID, we realized that our supply chains don’t have much redundancy,” she said. “How do we make sure that an ingredient that you get from India is the same as the ingredient that you may get from South America? And so that’s what we are doing with our technology at Canomiks, we are standardizing. We will be the first company to create such a new standard where we will be standardizing these ingredients for their biological effect.”
In addition to redundancy, funding is also a challenge.
“We have to be very good stewards of that money, making sure that whatever money, whatever we build with that money, is something that is going to help taxpayers and overall advance the field or come up with new technologies that are going to help people,” Dr. Pradhan-Nabstik said. “We hope that these types of funding structures remain and get even more funding from the government.”
To learn what ingredients Canomiks is focusing on and what it has in store for Q1, listen to the NutraCast.
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