As of January, Nimble has allowed companies through the ‘as a service’ model not only access to its proprietary SIMBA capsule, an ingestible capsule that enables passive sampling of small bowel luminal fluid, but also to dynamic small intestinal information from its health data platform. It provides knowledge regarding a wide variety of disease conditions, altering product development, research and discovery.
For example, the platform may help physicians better understand insights into numerous states, whether it is how diarrhea impacts an individual or how the microbiome influences the absorption of vitamins.
“We launched the platform which allows not only access to the capsules, but access to a data view of how to put that information [a company] collects in the context of a larger data set,” said Nimble Science CEO Dr. Sabina Bruehlmann, PhD.
In 2024 Nimble Science was selected as NutraIngredients-USA start up of the year for the company’s work unraveling the complexities of the human gut. The judges said the SIMBA capsule and the data it gathers from an at-home collection kit deliver actionable insights for personalized microbiome interventions.
The company was named a Probiota Pioneer in 2023, along with Tiny Health and Purity IQ.
How the capsule works
The small intestine is considered the most important digestive organ, where 90% of digestion happens.
The SIMBA capsule works after consuming food, taking a couple of hours to autonomously get to the small intestine. The capsule opens once it reaches the intestine, and it collects a sample for about two hours. Nimble Science said it operates “just like the Roomba robot goes around your room, like a vacuum.”
To collect fluids, samples must be stabilized during that process and the SIMBA capsule is the only one on the market that can accomplish that. The capsule is also sealed during collection.
“The ability to stabilize and have a large window exchange over a long period of time is the magic of the system,” Bruehlmann said.
Once the capsule is sent back to the laboratory, it goes for different kinds of downstream processing to analyze the microbiome, small molecules, various omics and lipids.
“We actually get bacterial DNA yields higher than endoscopy. I’m talking about like 20 times higher,” said Dr. Joseph Wang, PhD, Nimble Science’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
A new study
Nimble Science and its collaborators supported a study published in February in Current Developments in Nutrition that compares the use of naso-intestinal catheters (considered the gold standard) and the novel, less invasive aspiration capsules (the SIMBA capsule). One of the goals of the study was to explore the interaction between dietary lipids and the small intestinal microbiota when participants consumed a plant-based mild-ketogenic diet. The SIMBA capsule proved highly more effective at sample retrieval than the catheter.
“We intend to compare the future analyses of microbiota composition and lipid metabolites in capsule samples against small intestinal samples collected with the catheter,” the researchers wrote. “If we can confirm that the microbiota in the small intestine interacts with dietary lipids in humans, this would suggest future possibilities to stimulate health via modulation of the small intestinal microbiota using lipids or other dietary approaches.”
They added that the information in the study has the potential to offer “new insights for future mechanistic research in the dietary interaction with the small intestinal microbiota, also within the contexts of obesity, cardiovascular diseases and other chronic noninfectious diseases.”
