Leveraging unique capabilities in food and pharma
06 Nov 2018 | Evonik
At CPhI 2018, NutritionInsight spoke with Jean-Luc Herbeaux and Cornelis van den Muyzenberg of Evonik about the company's unique capabilities to offer solutions within the pharma and nutritional industries, as well as some of the key trends and health areas driving research and development.
This is Lucy Gunn at CPHI 2018 in Madrid, and I'm here at the Avonics stand joined by Jean-Luc.
What are some of the core capabilities that make Evonic very suitable to jumping into the convergence we are seeing now between nutrition, healthcare, and pharma?
So Ebonic, as you know, is one of the leading players, leading provider, supplier of specialty chemicals in the world.
So very strong set of competencies around the chemical synthesis, of course, via chemistry, but also fermentation.
We're one of the strongest players in the fermentation right now.
From strain development to fermentation optimization downstreaming.
Here in in CPHI the group you see here today is mostly focusing on pharma and healthcare, medical devices, that also comes with a number of capabilities and competencies which are very useful when it comes to.
Ingredients, food ingredients, formulation of nutraceuticals, the more complex the better.
Some of them require very complex functionality to, for example, protect probiotics from the stomach acids, things of that sort.
So we are very active already in that space with both products and services that obviously are linked to what we do also in the pharma space.
You mentioned fermentation quite clearly.
Why is that such an important aspect for this area?
It's a very good question.
Actually, what we see today very strongly is a tendency for the industry to move to nature identical products, right, in pharma, of course, but also in food.
Some of those natural ingredients are difficult to source, sometimes the quality is also difficult to control, and a lot of projects we touched today are there to mimic nat natural compounds, sorry, which are found in nature.
And managed to reproduce those compounds or even improve them via a fermentative product which is bio by design.
Looking more into health areas, what are some of the areas that you are tipping is very important in putting more investment into?
First of all, our logic to move into nutrient food ingredients was based on the recognition that the current approach to medicine will eventually fail.
Just too costly to treat the sort of conditions and diseases we see today, particularly because of the aging population and the fact that we have an increased propensity for chronic disease, chronic disease.
Really a problem for society because as you know they require constant treatment at very elevated costs.
My understanding is that a typical diabetic patient would cost a minimum of €15,000 a year just for the diabetic treatment.
Not curing the person, just keeping him somewhat functional and able to, you know, to live a almost normal life.
That said, we, we are really convinced that society will eventually fully understand the need to go for more preventive approaches, to not cure the disease when it at its onset, when we actually detect it, but try to find actually parameters, factors that promote the disease and try to curtail those as early as possible in the lifetime of individuals.
Take diabetes is something.
We know what to do.
There are nutraceutical products and solutions such as exercise, of course, and diet, which can prevent or at least delay the onset of diabetes significantly.
So we're trying to focus on diseases which are chronic.
By their nature, diabetes, I mentioned, cognitive diseases are also a big problem for society as the population ages, we see a lot of CNS and other cognitive issues popping up as significant in cost and impact to society.
We're also working on cardiovascular diseases again from a preventive approach or with a preventive approach.
And most recently we also starting to look at gut health.
There is strong science now showing that gut health has a lot to do as with general health, cognitive health, and understanding those factors, those links, and how to address some of those things before they become problems and therapeutic needs is what motivates us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Could you speak a little bit about how Ivonic is trying to leverage the technologies we've already discussed to create more consumer friendly products?
What we are seeing in the nutritional industry is a trend towards more science, more science-based supplements which are more effective.
So if you think about the solutions was talking about, you want to use those coating systems.
To deliver ingredients to the place where they are absorbed in the human body, to improve the bioavailability of those ingredients through those technologies or to protect them from an acid stomach where they are sensitive to, for example, the probiotics are very sensitive to pH, low pH.
We can protect them to deliver them to the intestine or the.
Any further products, examples that you can give?
Recently we have launched Healthberry and Novalum.
Healthberry is an anthocyanine concentrate with a very high anthocyanin content which we market B2C as a product called Medox in Norway and Sweden and Germany.
It has very good heart health benefits and also improves your immune system.
Through the antioxidant properties of the anthocyanides, and we recently launched the Ovalum, also a heart health product.
It's a free fatty acid product which is much more bioavailable than the standard ethyl esters, enabling customers to make smaller tablets which are more consumer friendly.
More forward looking, what can we expect in this space, as Jean Luc explained, we're looking at gut health, heart health, cognitive health, and diabetes.
So those are the focus areas we're looking at in terms of what kind of ingredients are on the market and how can we improve them to make them more effective.
Through our enabling technologies, so we have a multi-million dollar budget and we're looking at what kind of ingredients we could use in our portfolio and improve their bioavailability and then launch new products based on those formulations.
Thank you.
