ADM to explore personalized nutrition with Mayo Clinic

20 Sep 2017 --- Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) has announced a collaboration with Mayo Clinic in the field of personalized nutrition. The company will work with Mayo’s Microbiome Program, led by Dr. Heidi Nelson, to investigate microbial solutions to improve health and wellness, initially focusing on the maintenance of healthy body weight.

“We are pleased to enter into this cutting-edge collaboration with Mayo Clinic to study the association of specific probiotics, prebiotics, and other nutrients with body weight,” says Vikram Luthar, ADM’s president, Bioactives.

Personalized nutrition is an important growth platform for ADM. Earlier this year, it acquired Biopolis, a leading player in health-promoting microbial technology.

“Now, by working with Mayo Clinic, we are further expanding our capabilities to develop personalized nutrition solutions to improve health and wellness, and bring these beneficial solutions directly to consumers,” Luthar adds.

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

The goal of the collaboration 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 aim 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. Additional projects are planned to leverage both organizations’ strengths. Mayo Clinic will provide data analysis, modeling and gut microbiome expertise. For its part, ADM will bring expertise in food ingredients, strain development and genomics, as well as commercialization capabilities.

Speaking about the ingredients or projects that fit specifically with this new collaboration, Luthar tells NutritionInsight, “Our teams are focused on developing rigorously researched bioactive ingredients for a wide variety of food and feed applications, such as probiotic strain ES1, which can help people handle inflammation from gluten, and BPL1, a natural ally in healthy metabolism, with positive effects on weight and body fat management.”

“Consumers today are looking for foods with clean labels that taste good and promote health. An individual’s microbiome can influence how foods and ingredients are utilized, and the collaboration we announced with the Mayo Clinic is one way in which we will gain a deeper understanding of these complex relationships and how we can develop and combine ingredients to help enhance health,” Luthar concludes.

By Lucy Gunn

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