In Search of Better Bioactives

Kraft Foods collaborates with Medisyn Technologies to further its food ingredient portfolio.

By Joanna Cosgrove
Online Editor

The nation’s 76 million Baby Boomers are increasingly turning to foods to better maintain their health and manage disease conditions, including obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis and high blood pressure. As these demographic trends continue, the global functional foods market is expected to grow to $90.5 billion by 2013, according to Just-Food “2008 Global Market Review of Functional Foods.” Endeavoring to stay ahead of the curve and on the cutting edge, Kraft Foods Global Inc., Northfield, IL, tapped Minneapolis, MN-based Medisyn Technologies, Inc., to help discover effective bioactive ingredients suitable for food use.

“Helping consumers achieve better nutritional balance and manage health is an important food trend,” commented Todd Abraham, senior vice president, Nutrition & Research, Kraft Foods. He added that Kraft is “excited and optimistic” about the potential bioactive ingredient discoveries that lie ahead.

The work, which began in December 2008, utilizes Medisyn’s Forward Engineering technology platform to identify, analyze and optimize promising bioactive compounds. According to David Land, Medisyn’s president, the technology accurately predicts how a compound will behave based on its structure, greatly streamlining the discovery and development process of food ingredients that can be used to provide healthier choices for consumers.

Mr. Land explained that his company’s Forward Engineering technology platform is a way of mathematically describing compounds and specifically how the atoms are interconnected inside the molecule.” That allows us to get to a bioactive template for a given property of interest,” he said. “The significance of that for the nutraceutical industry is that you can decide what the market need is, describe that need in terms of properties that are required in a product and then design to that product need. We actually use the properties as the descriptor set that we work our mathematics to, to apply to the natural universe of compounds and then bring forward bioactives that meet that property set.”

Although Mr. Land was unable to disclose specific information about the types of bioactives or end-use products Medisyn is working on for Kraft, he did say the work falls into the realm of health and wellness foods. “In terms of the application, there’s no prescribed restriction,” he said. “We’re calling it food or food ingredient; ultimately it will depend on the type of bioactive compounds we come up with before we determine the type of food product they can be in.”

The company is currently busy scouring natural compounds for novel use applications. “The power of the Forward Engineering technology is that we can review all of nature’s compounds that have been identified to date,” he commented. “If you think about the natural domain, your opportunity for innovation, patent protection and intellectual property will come around novel uses for those known compounds. Our specific assignment is to identify novel uses for those known compounds.”

Since December 2004, Medisyn has applied its novel methodology to about 50 commercial projects that span pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, animal health and agricultural products. “We have about 36 active projects right now, split largely between pharmaceutical and nutraceutical. Some examples from our internal pipeline center around areas such as oncology, pain and inflammation, infectious diseases and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Mr. Land. On the nutraceutical side, the company has done work in satiety, sexual health, mental health (anxiety, dream state and cognition/acuity), bone density and muscle relaxant fields.

With regard to Alzheimer’s disease, Medisyn, partnered with Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and is currently testing eight different compounds, “any one of which would be a breakthrough,” Mr. Land exclaimed.

Though Medisyn’s field concentrations are widespread, Mr. Land said the common thread is the platform that examines the bioactive properties of compounds. “Whether we’re doing a pharmaceutical, nutraceutical or animal health project, we’re still going through the same process of trying to discern active compounds that have already been discovered, mathematically look at the bioactive pattern of those compounds and then applying to new discovery,” he said. “In the pharmaceutical space, we’re looking for novel compounds. In the nutraceutical space we’re looking for novel uses for existing compounds. The exciting thing for us is we can leverage all the knowledge—the entire pharmaceutical industry and all of the R&D they’re doing to the extent that the compounds and experimental data are published in existing databases—and apply it back into the nutraceutical space.

“The powerful aspect is knowing the market need, then backing it up with bioactive compounds in nature. This allows us to start with the knowledge pool for figuring out the biomass sources for the bioactive ingredients,” he continued. “It’s a purposeful search, rather than taking an extract of a plant and figuring out if it does anything. You know what you’re looking for since much of natural space has been catalogued. You can usually trace it back to natural sources, then when you’re doing your extracts or blends, you already know that the bioactives exist in that biomass source from which you are trying to extract.”

Medisyn’s overriding intention, according to Mr. Land, is to “create an innovation pipeline, so the innovation we’re bringing to the marketplace is greater knowledge around the specific compounds in nature that make a difference in our health or restoration in health, so we can consume food more intelligently.” Further, he said, the ultimate goal is to offer industry ingredients so they can bring to market more food products that “we can have confidence in [knowing that] they scientifically impact our health in a positive way for a given condition.”

The duration of the Kraft-Medisyn collaboration is open-ended, with project lifecycles usually spanning 18 months from the beginning to end.