Nutraceutical Discovery – from plant extracts to functional food

Nutrition may have a significant additional impact on health and opens the possibility for the development of defined nutritional products with desired health benefits. Nutraceuticals as food supplements should have a long-term effect in preventing a wide range of medical conditions, but many products lack efficacy and cannot deliver what they promise. DSM Nutritional Products follows a scientific and target-based discovery approach to find and develop new products in this field. We have acquired and created several plant extract libraries from different geographical locations and with a large diversity of plant types. Our approach in the discovery of new products is based on high-throughput screening (HTS) in microtiter plate format. A large number of extracts and natural products is tested in a sequence of assays (e.g. binding, enzyme or in vitro). The number of tests per assay is reduced at each level, while the quality and information is increasing. Active compounds are then evaluated for various aspects like toxicity, abundance in food chain plant, production costs, etc. Passing leads are further on tested for efficacy in vivo and finally candidates also for human evidence. Projects using screening activity are for example mental performance, metabolic health, and healthy aging/wellness.

Ligustilide from the TCM source (TCM=traditional chinese medicine) Ligusticum chuanxiong will be examined as an example.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank B. Müller, K. Arnosti and B. Colletto for their valuable contributions in the discovery process.