Cargill to accelerate microbiome R&D via Eagle Genomics multi-year collaboration

21 May 2020 --- Industry behemoth Cargill’s health tech arm has signed a multi-year platform agreement with life sciences and microbiome discovery company Eagle Genomics. The collaboration seeks to enable the digital transformation of microbiome and life sciences R&D across Cargill’s global locations. The deployment of the Eagle Genomics’ platform, called e[datascientist], will initially enable Cargill’s Health Technologies business to organize and synthesize additional insights from microbiome data amassed by the company over the past decade. 

Speaking to NutritionInsight, Anthony Finbow, CEO at Eagle Genomics explained that they can’t yet disclose the financial details of the agreement, and that Cargill will be targeting both human and animal research.

“By revealing relationships between microbiome data entities and relevant multi-omics data, the platform will further enable Cargill to advance our understanding of the complex association between the microbiome and digestive and immune health in humans and animals,” notes Mike Johnson, Marketing Director at Cargill Health Technologies.

“Gut health is a key concern for humans, pets and livestock. Many people suffer from gut issues ranging from mild discomfort to clinical conditions. Pet parents see gut health as a critical issue to solve. Livestock gut health has been linked to performance, stress tolerance and overall wellbeing. A key step in truly solving these challenges is to understand what a healthy gut microbiome is and what changes can be made to promote gut health in both people and animals,” Johnson tells NutritionInsight.

By revealing relationships between microbiome data entities and relevant multi-omics data, the platform will enable Cargill to advance its understanding of the association between the microbiome and digestive and immune health.With the capabilities to manage, explore and interpret life sciences data beyond the microbiome, the Eagle Genomics platform will ultimately allow Cargill to digitally reinvent its biological research activities to bring innovative products to customers faster, the company says. 

With a particular focus on the microbiome, Eagle Genomics is touted as accelerating advances in the fields of sustainable agriculture and functional food. The Eagle Genomics e[datascientist] platform applies artificial intelligence (AI), a unique data valuation engine and pioneering visualization to navigate and reveal novel relationships between data entities at microbiomical scale.

“We are happy to be enabling Cargill to explore microbiome data for food and digestive health, an area that we believe will be transformed by microbiome discovery over the next decade. We look forward to a future of industry-disrupting food and nutraceutical products for humans and animals, informed by our platform,” says Anthony Finbow, CEO at Eagle Genomics. 

Eagle Genomics is an AI-augmented knowledge discovery platform, seeking to “revolutionize” how scientists conduct life sciences research and is bridging the gap between data and new insights in a systematic and traceable way.

The microbiome’s importance is increasingly highlighted by science. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, major industry players are exploring the potential of probiotics and their positive effects on gut health to prevent or improve coronavirus outcomes. ADM Biopolis and Hospital de Sagunto, in Spain, announced yesterday that they have launched a clinical trial into the effects of administering a food supplement containing three of ADM’s live probiotic strains on COVID-19 patients. The trial began at the end of March and aims to promote gut microbiome balance to help improve health functions related to outcomes for COVID-19 patients in high-risk groups. Probiotics’ potential in tackling the novel coronavirus is increasingly brought to the fore and many players in the space are exploring this opportunity.

In the same probiotic arena, Biosearch Life launched a clinical trial examining the effect of its Hereditum Immunactiv K8 product on COVID-19, while companies such as Probi and Lehvoss Nutrition note a recent boost to their immunity-related probiotic products. Notably, last week Lallemand announced it is partnering with Canadian companies Biotechnologies Ulysse and Bio-K Plus to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. The vaccine could contain live bacteria and yeast that have the same properties as the virus, but without the contagious load of COVID-19.

By Kristiana Lalou