The year of AI is 2023. This year, artificial intelligence tools appeared surprisingly quickly and in a wide range of forms. An AI arms race ensued after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, with businesses from all sectors coming up with creative and novel methods to employ AI to carry out specialized tasks.
The most recent industry to be affected by AI is the nutraceutical sector. New technologies are changing the parameters of what can be developed in the nutraceutical industry. Here are a few examples of how nutraceutical companies have used AI thus far.
AI Can Quickly Isolate Bioactives
The prediction capacity of artificial intelligence surpasses that of human hypothesis-writing. Artificial intelligence, according to Sofia Elizondo, cofounder and chief operating officer of Brightseed (San Francisco, CA), is the most potent technology available to the nutraceutical business for quickly identifying superior health solutions.
According to Elizondo, “Brightseed employs AI to identify bioactives in nature and market them as dietary components for gut health.” Our pipeline of bioactives covers a wide range of connected health issues. Compounds undergoing in-depth research are profiled and annotated by our in-house AI, Forager.
According to Elizondo, forager is able to identify which compounds have the potential to be bioactive and then connect those valuable chemicals to their biological mechanisms of action at a depth, rate, and speed that was previously unattainable. She says that because Forager’s AI models are built using carefully chosen biomedical data, the industry can de-risk clinical validation.
First, forager makes predictions about which compounds are likely to be present in specific plants, fungus, and bacterial sources. Secondly, it forecasts how those substances will behave within the body. Thirdly, it forecasts which biological pathways will be impacted by particular bioactive substances. Following Forager’s analysis, Brightseed’s team conducts additional investigations to estimate the compound’s potency, validating predictions in vitro using biological experiments.
Artificial Intelligence Accelerates the Search for Ingredients
Making minor modifications to already-existing ingredients is a common practice of the slow and laborious traditional methods of ingredient discovery. The chief medical and innovation officer of Nuritas (Dublin, Ireland), Andrew Franklyn-Miller, PhD, claims that artificial intelligence makes it possible for professionals in the nutrition sector to find new components more quickly. According to him, the industry isn’t set up to take on the risk of incurring large research and development costs, and it can take 20 years or more for a new ingredient to reach the market. But with artificial intelligence, research may proceed more quickly and development can be made less risky.
According to Franklyn-Miller, “Our platform has demonstrated 69% success at the discovery phase and over 80% success at clinical trial, with over 60 patents and 13 publications.” “We usually take 24 months to reach the market.”
To predict peptides sourced from plants, Nuritas combines deep learning, generative modeling, knowledge graphs, data-scraping methods, and GPT-like modeling. The business uses this technique in tandem with its in-house developed Peptide Vault, verifying forecasts through biological experiments. According to the company, Nuritas’ AI discovery platform, Magnifier, finds new ingredients by utilizing the largest collection of peptides derived from plants in the world.
Utilizing Personalized Dietary Plans A Single Step Ahead
Though experts think that’s just the beginning, artificial intelligence is incredibly helpful for bioactive isolation and component identification. According to experts, artificial intelligence (AI) represents the next development in tailored nutrition and will open the door for a new class of nutraceuticals with specific advantages.
“In the future, artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to analyze personal data, including genetic, health, and lifestyle data, to connect consumers with solutions that are specifically tailored to meet their needs,” adds Elizondo. “We anticipate that bioactives will become increasingly prevalent on product labels in the near future.”
AI will be able to go much farther in the tailored nutrition space because to more technology advancements. Franklyn-Miller thinks data from wearable technology will enable significant breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that will empower corporations to see the direct benefits of their compounds.
“To track the efficacy of clinical trials, we currently use EEGs, Oura Rings, and continuous blood-glucose monitors,” he says. “I think that in the future, we will become more interested in genetics. AI will only become more proficient at early bioactive identification as the platform learns.
Artificial Intelligence Will Shape Nutraceuticals in the Future
The potential of artificial intelligence is enormous, and the nutraceutical sector has only just begun to explore it. New AI techniques will make ingredient discovery faster and more successful, lowering the risk involved in introducing new products to the market for the industry. Still, this is just the start. The industry is about to undergo a radical transformation due to the unanticipated impact of artificial intelligence.
