Brightseed, a company specializing in the discovery of bioactive compounds through its AI platform, Forager, has expanded its innovation programs for partners.
 
Through new rapid profiling and microbiome capabilities, the company can help food, nutrition, and bioscience companies unlock new health insights and accelerate product development and commercialization timelines.
 
The company will showcase these new developments and capabilities at IPA World Congress and Probiota Americas 2024 in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, June 12.
 
The new microbiome discovery programs include the identification of microbially-derived bioactives, and associated health benefits when fermented ingredients and other prebiotic material interact with gut bacteria.

Brightseed is collecting and analyzing fermented sources from food around the globe with the help of global industry partners such as Korean food company CJ Foods as part of this effort.
 
“Our microbiome programs, which also include synbiotic product development, are tailored for companies who are deeply vested in bringing novel and clinically validated products into their food and consumer health portfolios,” said David Brown, Vice President of Business Development at Brightseed. “The global market size for probiotics is valued at $58 billion, and synbiotics provide more robust benefits to consumers than probiotics alone. Forager allows us to predict bioactives resulting from the interaction between bacterial strains and natural ingredients, which is an exciting application of AI in microbiome research and innovation.”
 
In addition to its microbiome capabilities, Brightseed can co-develop novel bioactive ingredients in specific health areas of interest, or by using Forager AI, to investigate the full potential of a company’s existing ingredients. Rapid profiling can help deliver actionable insights into phytochemical or bioactive composition of these ingredients, or insights into a supply chain, in just six to eight weeks, giving companies an accelerated timeline for clinical validation and commercialization.
 
“Brightseed’s innovation programs and our dedicated pipeline of bioactive ingredients are designed to empower the nutrition industry with differentiated and efficacious solutions that target key consumer health areas including gut health, metabolic health, and cognition,” said Brown. “With Rapid Profiling and our expanded Microbiome capacity, we are delivering innovative health products at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional discovery and development approaches. This enables our partners to expand into new health areas and diversify the ways in which they can investigate bioactives in their existing products, supply chains, side streams and waste streams.”
 
Brightseed now has a digital library of over seven million compounds mapped from plants, fungi, and bacterial strains in connection with 23 human health areas, and the company reports that its data bank on bioactives has grown to eight times what is publicly known. This data can be used to predict bioactives resulting from the interaction between bacterial strains and natural ingredients.
 
A vast number of bioactives are still undiscovered and haven’t yet been isolated, and many are only accessible through complex interactions between food and gut flora. Forager’s machine learning and metabolomic profiling systematically identifies these potential bioactive compounds, and maps them to health benefits and human biomarkers. Its generative AI model includes learning patterns of validated training data from nature’s chemistry.
 
In addition to these programs, Forager’s insights have led to Brightseed launching eight ingredients for the B2B marketplace. Recently, the company introduced a prebiotic dietary fiber sourced from hemp hulls called Bio Gut Fiber, which contains two previously undiscovered bioactive compounds. Manitoba Harvest recently co-launched Organic Bioactive Fiber with Brightseed containing this hemp fiber, which is now available at Whole Foods Markets and Amazon.
 
At IPA World Congress and Probiota Americas, Brigthseed will give a presentation called “How AI is Decoding the Micorbiome, in the Tech Advances session on Wednesday, June 12, at 12 p.m. MDT.
 
Then, at the American Society of Microbiology Microbe Conference in Atlanta on June 14, Brightseed will present new research on Bio Gut Fiber’s impact on the gut microbiome via a poster, “Novel plant-derived bioactive compounds shape the human gut microbiome in vitro.”