ADM gets personal with new microbiome collaboration with Mayo Clinic

20-Sep-2017 - Last updated on 21-Sep-2017 at 15:05 GMT

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) has announced a collaboration with the Mayo Clinic on personalized nutrition solutions to healthy body weight through probiotics, prebiotics, and other nutrients.

The company announced earlier this week that it will work with the Mayo Clinic’s Microbiome Program, led by Dr. Heidi Nelson.

“Working with Mayo, we hope to learn more about how complex interactions at the microbial level may impact a variety of health conditions, including individual tendencies toward body fat; how bioactives in our diet may be powerful tools to improve health; and how we can eventually bring these new technologies to our customers and an increasingly health-conscious public,” Vikram Luthar, ADM’s president, Bioactives, told NutraIngredients-USA.

The collaboration will focus initially on body fat reduction, added Luthar, but the company hopes to move forward to examine a variety of ways in which probiotics, metabolites, and other nutrients can impact health and wellness.

The Biopolis angle

“A major part of how ADM will make the collaboration with the Mayo Clinic work is through the investments we are already making in this space, particularly the technology and expertise we added earlier this year when we acquired a 90% ownership stake in Biopolis, a leading provider of microbial and genome sequencing technology with a strong portfolio of novel food ingredients,” said Luthar.

“Today, our teams are focused on developing rigorously researched ingredients that could have beneficial impacts on conditions ranging from skin health to gluten intolerance to weight and body fat management.”

Personalized nutrition model

Luthar said that personalized nutrition is an important growth platform for the company, and a key goal of the collaboration with the Mayo Clinic is to develop a personalized nutrition model that predicts the effects of probiotics, prebiotics and other metabolites, as well as other nutrients in microbiome shifts, for improving individual health.

In the initial phase, ADM and Mayo Clinic will work to design a computational method for testing probiotics, metabolites, and other intervention strategies that promote the growth of gut microbes linked to healthy body weight, stated the company in a press release.

“ADM is a global provider of natural ingredients, with cutting edge R&D and production capabilities; ultimately, we hope to bring those capabilities to bear and deliver nutrition solutions within consumer products,” said Luthar.