DSM has officially sealed the deal on its acquisition of Glycom, an early life nutrition company specializing in human milk olygosaccharides, to add to its portfolio of nutritional lipids, vitamins, and custom nutrient premixes, furthering its stake in the early life nutrition and broader dietary supplement space.
 
HMOs are the third largest solid component of human milk after fat and lactose. They naturally occur in human breast milk and have evolved over thousands of years to provide unique human health benefits. In particular, they support both immune and cognitive development during breastfeeding.
 
There is significant interest in HMO use as a dietary supplement and potential use in the food, beverage, and pet food spaces, and have been researched for their potential to fulfill unmet medical nutrition needs such as irritable bowel syndrome.
 
Glycom is a major pioneer in HMOs, and has a research pipeline backing each of its products. It has the only fully-integrated HMO production facility worldwide. The company has its own product development, preclinical, and clinical programs, regulatory team, and a large-scale production site in its manufacturing plant in Esbjerg, Denmark. Next-generation HMOs are part of Glycom’s future plans, with four novel HMOs becoming available this year to further catalyze the already fast-growing HMO market.
 
“We warmly welcome the Glycom team to DSM and are proud to call this professional team our colleagues,” Jeremy Xu, president of DSM’s Human Nutrition and Health, said. “Together, we will make it possible for our customers to develop efficacious and safe solutions, which is the fundament of both Glycom and DSM values and a part of our promise to help keep the world’s growing population healthy.”
 
“Today is the start of an exciting journey to bring us closer together as one organization and a team and to synergistically combine our complementary competences and expertise,” Odd Hansen, Glycom CEO, said. “We look forward to offering our HMO portfolio and integrating it in oru full solutions offering for DSM’s broad and global early life nutrition and dietary supplements customer base.”