Scaling nature: Spotlight on the power of AI for innovative nutrition

15 Apr 2024 --- As the interest in AI spreads, the nutrition industry is pondering its potential, from nutrition advice to the large-scale incorporation of AI in companies to advance R&D and product development. We discuss the use and several applications of this technology with PIPA — a science and innovation company that leverages AI for nutrition and ingredient industries — and Brightseed, which uses its AI platform Forager to identify bioactives and their health benefits. 

“Nature is incredible, but if you take it to an extreme, you actually hurt it,” John Melo, CEO of PIPA, tells Nutrition Insight. 

“The idea is to use nature to inspire and identify some of the greatest possibilities. At a molecular level, chemistry comes from nature and can have a huge impact. Using this concept to engineer organisms and, through fermentation, repeatedly and sustainably scale what nature gives you is a thing of beauty.” 

He notes that repeatability and scalability are essential to advance innovations in biotechnology, where AI can help accelerate the scientific method and experimentations. 

“Synthetic biology is about engineering the molecules underneath that with AI, telling you what molecules you need and how to formulate it to make the consumer happy. When you can make those things come together, you can take the best of nature and truly scale it in a way that has an impact of planetary magnitude.”

Swati Kalgaonkar, Brightseed’s medical and scientific affairs director, adds: “AI is a groundbreaking innovation at this point. If you think about the turn of the century, when people first got acquainted with the internet, for instance, and everybody wanted to have a network strategy in their business — today we’re looking at that strategy being AI.”

“People want to understand how they can take AI and use that as a strategy to further their business. The food industry is no different.” 

Power of prediction 
According to Kalgoankar, AI plays a role at different levels in a company. 

“It’s not just the consumer trends that AI is helping with to predict, and therefore bringing in products, or helping to create products that help with those consumer demands. On the product side, it also helps increase efficiency around product safety, labeling and innovation.” 

“A platform like Brightseed’s Forager that’s helping to find novel bioactives that then go into products is the kind of innovation a lot of the industry is looking at, and I expect it to keep growing year on year.” 

Melo cautions that a lack of understanding of what AI means may lead to a hype versus reality disconnect.Meanwhile, Melo explains how AI helps the industry experiment and determine the unknown. “We can remove a tremendous amount of experimentation by using AI and machine learning, building models that can predict outcomes with a high level of accuracy, and narrowing down the truly unknown.” 

“Using AI at the center of companies, taking out experimentation, driving time to market faster, delivering the products that the consumer has a high probability of accepting, because we’re predicting what they would accept, is where I see AI,” he underscores. 

Though some start-ups offering new plant-based or alternative proteins have failed, he links the success of large corporations in developing such new product categories to their “tremendous amount of data on consumer preferences,” which start-ups lack. 

Hype versus reality 
At the same time, Melo highlights that a lack of understanding of what AI means is the new technology’s greatest challenge. “Everything now has AI stamped on it. How much AI is happening? What true predictive analysis is taking place?”

He cautions that because there aren’t many pure AI services in place, there is a risk that, at some point, “people are disappointed with what AI promises versus its reality.” 

To offset this hype versus reality disconnect, he adds that AI also offers a breakthrough in productivity. While there have been substantial investments in computing power and vast increases in the level of data generated in the last decades, questions have come up on how this data leads to increased productivity. 

“There is a hype vs. reality disconnect, but also the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes — finally getting to true productivity gains from all the data we’ve been generating, where the AI layer is the value-added intelligence for all the data that’s been generated for the last 20–30 years.”

Bioactive identification 
Brightseed’s AI platform, Forager, drives innovation for the company, illuminating natural bioactives and delivering health benefits to products. 

Alina Slotnik, the company’s VP of bioactives, highlights that these plant compounds tap into the growing consumer demand for higher nutritional and health benefits in foods and wellness products. “It continues to be our focus to grow the library and continually accelerate the pipeline of ingredients we’re bringing to market.” 

“Bioactives are here to fuel that as much as possible, not only in finding bioactives across a greater breadth of health areas and health territories but also creating these ingredients to be functional for different types of food, beverage and supplement applications.”

Slotnik and Kalgaonkar shared their insights on AI and bioactives at Natural Products Expo West 2024.Slotnik says that the essence of Forager is simple and accessible. “We profile natural matter from plants, fungi and microbes, and we start with those samples at a tissue level.”

“Those tissues get genetically characterized. On the opposite end, we have a predictive database that started with all available research on health benefits related to mechanisms of action, but we’ve enhanced that database.” 

This proprietary database matches the characterization of a mechanism of action with predicted health benefits from studied and validated receptors. 

After screening millions of plant tissues, Brightseed’s database consists of approximately 30,000 predicted compounds with health benefits in 23 health areas.

“We’re focusing on getting ingredients to market, and those ingredients are going to cover a lot of health territories,” continues Slotnik. “Some of the key health areas that Brightseed’s ingredient portfolio will focus on are gut health, metabolic health, brain health, including cognition, mental health and sleep, and liver health.”

Human intervention 
With the potential power of AI to accelerate innovation, both Slotnik and Melo highlight the importance of human intervention. 

For example, Slotnik explains that Brightseed conducts validation in a traditional way. “We do benchtop analysis, in silico, then in vitro and in vivo and then we use the validations to help improve the model and increase the accuracy.” 

Meanwhile, Melo illustrates that in science, many predictive tools look at the number of times an article has been cited. Even good quality articles may not get a high competence mark if not enough people have reviewed them, commented on them or used them in citations. Meanwhile, people look at the content of a paper for new ideas for testing, validations and even patents. 

He concludes that the “human validation of the AI machine coming up with a discovery will be a breakthrough for how much innovation there is and at which rate innovations end up impacting the world.” 

By Jolanda van Hal