A personalized nutrition approach to obesity and sleep: Mayo Clinic to partner with AI-driven Viome

30 Jul 2019 --- Mayo Clinic and Viome – a company transforming health through personalized nutrition based on individual and microbiome biology – have joined forces to better understand the role of nutrition in disease. The collaboration will explore the potential of Viome’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven personalized diets in helping to manage disorders such as sleep apnea and obesity. The two companies hope to acquire a better understanding of how nutrition affects chronic diseases and to explore the effectiveness of personalized nutrition as a strategy to help in treatment, and possibly even the prevention of these diseases.

The partnership comes as personalized nutrition approaches are gaining traction in the industry as the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach to health becomes increasingly outdated. Science alone is uncovering the plethora of individual differences which necessitate individualized approaches to health and diet for general wellness, but also to tackle chronic diseases such as diabetes.

The collaboration will leverage Mayo Clinic’s medical expertise and Viome’s proprietary microbiome analysis platform and will focus on measures of obesity (including body fat percent), metabolism (as measured with blood glucose test HbA1c) and sleep.

Viome hopes to influence the future of health through personalized nutrition based on individual biology. The company uses advanced technology developed for National Security at the Los Alamos National Lab, US, to analyze all the genes expressed by the gut microbiome to assess if the body is converting the foods we consume into helpful nutrients or harmful toxins. Viome’'s AI platform transforms these insights into actions by delivering precise personalized nutrition recommendations for healthy living.

Science alone is uncovering the plethora of individual differences which necessitate individualized approaches to health and diet.“Everything we do at Viome is in an effort to create a world where illness is optional. This partnership is no exception,” notes Naveen Jain, CEO and founder of Viome. “Through this collaboration with Mayo Clinic, we will be able to amplify the critical importance of personalized nutrition and its direct impact on people suffering from obesity and sleep disorders.”

Viome's personalized diets are generated by algorithms that have been developed using data from 10,000s of people. Using Viome’s advanced Gut Intelligence test, the company is able to make diet recommendations for everyone, so that people do not have to spend years trying different diets and not finding one that works for them, Jain tells NutritionInsight. 

“We are also focusing on all sleep disorders, which are very common and cause many health and lifestyle problems. We already know that nutrition and gut microbiome affect sleep. With Mayo Clinic, we will conduct a large study to understand these connections, which may lead to the development of personalized diets and supplements that improve sleep,” Jain adds.

The study will be led by Virend Somers, MD, Ph.D., Director of the Cardiovascular Facility and the Sleep Facility within Mayo Clinic's Center for Clinical and Translational Science.

Speaking on the collaboration, Nard Clabbers, Senior Business Developer Personalized Nutrition at TNO, tells NutritionInsight, “Personalization in nutrition and offering people personalized nutritional advice has been shown to help them to adhere to better diets, and it may be able to help prevent non-communicable diseases.” 

Mayo Clinic and Dr. Somers have a financial interest in the technology to be used and Mayo Clinic will use any revenue it receives to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.

The AI approach
AI is increasingly being used across multiple industries due to its data-driven, accurate results that often also mean a reduction in production costs. In the case of personalized nutrition, however, the collection of data could mean a small revolution in the status quo. 

“The future of nutrition and nutritional advice will rely on data, AI and machine learning. If you feed the required data to the AI, it can personalize recommendations. In addition, if you continuously update the data and the AI can detect the subtle differences or alterations in it, it could potentially recognize a pattern for disease or the recommendations that work best. This will generate a large amount of data,” Clabbers says.

These amplified results can then be used to increase the effectiveness of nutrition advice, he says. “You learn from what you measure.”

Going forward, the approach tousing AI for nutrition and disease will be wide, Clabbers predicts. “The AI approach, however, has to involve professionals who will be aided by it and also help further evolve it. It’s a collaboration and I don’t believe we can do without professionals just yet,” he concludes. 

AI’s popularity is rapidly growing within the nutrition arena, with Irish biotech company Nuritas being another key player. The company says it seeks to “unlock life-changing molecules in commonly consumed, everyday staple foods.” The use of technologies such as AI and 3D printing to boost the growing nutrigenomic market is predicted to expand in the coming year and Nuritas seems set to ride the wave. 

In the same space, Imperial College London researchers previously created a network-based machine learning platform which can identify food-based, cancer-beating molecules. The platform uses AI to process huge volumes of data on a network of smartphones while they charge overnight. 

Along with developers at Google, Nestlé India launched the country’s first AI nutrition assistant – Nestlé India Nutrition Assistant (NINA) – as part of the company’s ambitions to further strengthen its credentials as an expert of nutrition and to deepen trust with consumers and stakeholders. NINA is integrated into Nestlé India’s new corporate service website, which is geared towards parents seeking nutritional information for their children’s health needs.

By Kristiana Lalou