World Microbiome Day 2022: Focusing on food ingredient innovations, going “beyond the pill”

27 Jun 2022 --- Today marks this year’s World Microbiome Day, with the theme of “Celebration of the microbial world,” intending to increase understanding of the microbiome and its impact on health. NutritionInsight speaks with Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO and managing partner at Seventure Partners, on how the microbiome space is shifting to go “beyond the pill.”

“An in-depth understanding of the role of the microbiome within the human body, as well as concerning the metabolism of food and nutritional products, is likely to have an impact on the regulation in the nutritional ingredients market in multiple ways,” says de Cremoux.

Seventure is a France-based venture capital firm aiming to focus on the microbiome’s broader effects, including new food ingredient innovations. The firm has invested in the microbiome with its Health for Life Capital (HFLC) funds to implement this. The funds will focus on the microbiome’s broader significance.

“The Health For Life Capital funds focus ‘beyond the pill’ as an approach to than just focusing on drugs. Our view is that food, nutrition and medicine cannot be separated and the more we learn about the microbiome, the more inseparable these seem.”

“The HFLC funds aim to support companies that can provide us with a better understanding in various areas, such as the links between food, digestion, drug metabolism, or the microbiome’s interaction with the immune system.”

More knowledge of the microbiome
Understanding the microbiome can enable the improved design of clinical trials with better-defined endpoints and enhanced patient stratification, which can then serve as a strong rationale for other future study designs, leading to better data and broader insight, de Cremoux explains.

Seventure Partners aims to understand how food and drugs impact the microbiome composition and the whole human body.“It also allows us to explain some currently lesser-known underlying mechanisms of action of already commercialized nutritional products, which can further strengthen the need for accurate data,” she adds. “More accurate and meaningful clinical trial data and scientific evidence could set the bar higher and lead to more stringent nutritional guidelines in the future.”

Additionally, this knowledge will help develop treatments and aid prevention before the result of certain conditions.

Accessing microbiome modulation
The HFLC funds aim to build new companies, shape solutions and create new approaches for the whole microbiome segment, details de Cremoux.

“Another aspect of our focus is to use microbiome modulation to support patients with diseases and conditions they are already receiving treatment for, such as cancer or cardiological conditions,” she adds.

“We see this as a growing field, where microbiome modulation can improve the efficacy of other drugs, lessen side effects or, in general, improve the quality of life of these patients imminently, even in cases where effective treatment is yet to be discovered.”

As an example, dysbiosis is correlated with several diseases, including autism or Parkinson’s disease as examples and microbiome modulation can help people living with these conditions to experience a significant improvement almost immediately, de Cremoux explains.

“We expect meaningful clinical data in the future, which will help us widen this aspect of microbiome modulation as well.”

Recently, a US-based Georgetown University study highlighted the importance of the microbiome, finding that a lack of biodiversity in the gut microbiome may be linked to cardiovascular disease and heart failure.

Regulations for microbiome ingredients?
Seventure works on developing these solutions, investigating what regulatory category they might fall into.

Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO and managing partner at Seventure Partners.“Prebiotics, postbiotics and probiotics are important regulatory categories and likely to be the most promising in the short term but might be omitting other approaches. In addition, it is also important to mention synbiotics, a mixture of pro-and prebiotics, which is an interesting category.”

“One of the main differences between drugs and nutritional ingredients today is that while the former specifically addresses diseases and has a pharmacological effect on the human body, nutritional ingredients focus on healthy individuals and individual conditions.”

The fundamental question for the regulatory authorities will be whether they consider microbiome modulation as something that exerts a pharmacological impact on humans and whether these modulators would need specific regulatory constraints or not, Seventure adds.

“It is important to see the nutritional aspect of plant-based or microbe-derived (precision fermentation) food products will be different than animal-derived food and will have consequences on consumers’ health and their microbiome,” says de Cremoux.

“Food ingredients will either be added to new products as supplements or functional foods as an addition to the diet.”

By Nicole Kerr