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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Brightseed

Danone Expands Brightseed Partnership to Uncover Hidden Healthy Compounds in Plants

Danone and Brightseed announced an expanded partnership today that will have the food and beverage giant using Brightseed’s Forager artificial intelligence platform to uncover more phytonutrients from additional plant-based ingredients.

Brightseed’s technology studies plants on a molecular level to identify and catalog previously unknown compounds that could have health benefits. For example, earlier this year Brightseed announced that it had discovered in pre-clinical trials that the bioactive compounds N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF) found in black pepper can help with the clearance of fat accumulated in the liver. After these initial findings through Brightseed’s AI, the company will move forwards to confirm the results through clinical trials to determine efficacy as well as other factors such as dosage and administering the compounds.

Danone first teamed up with Brightseed in June of last year to study potential new benefits of soy. (Danone owns the Silk brand.) According to today’s press announcement sent to The Spoon, Brightseed’s Forager discovered 10 times more bioactives than previously known and 7 new health areas. As these findings are confirmed by more clinical data, brands like Danone benefit because they can tout additional health benefits around their products, but consumers benefit because there are then more plant-based tools to fight different ailments.

What’s interesting about companies in the AI space like Brightseed, Spoonshot, and Journey Foods is how they are shortening the discovery period for food companies looking to create new products. Before machine learning and artificial intelligence, food manufacturers had to first hypothesize about how particular ingredients might work together, or the health benefits of an ingredient. After that guess, they would run physical tests in a lab to see if they were remotely close in their hypothesis. If they were wrong, they’d have to start all over again from scratch. AI helps shrink that time by doing a lot of that guesswork up front quickly in a computer before any lab time is needed.

The whole space is very new, but Danone expanding on its partnership with Brightseed is a vote of confidence for the technology and should lead to more brands jumping into the use of AI and computational biology.

Brightseed’s First Major Phytonutrient Discovery Finds Black Pepper May Help with Fatty Liver

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover previously hidden phytonutrients in plants, today announced preclinical data from its first major discovery targeting liver and metabolic health.

The discovery was made with Forager, Brightseed’s AI platform that looks at plants on a molecular level to identify novel phytonutrient compounds (for example, antioxidants in blueberries). Once found, Forager then catalogs these compounds and uses that information to predict the health benefits of those compounds.

With today’s announcement, Brightseed’s Forager has identified phytonutrients that can help with fat accumulation in the pancreas and liver, a condition linked to obesity. Brightseed explained its findings in a press release, writing:

Using a computational approach with data from Brightseed’s plant compound library, Forager identified two natural compounds with promising bioactive function, N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF). Researchers determined that these compounds acted through a novel biological mechanism governing the accumulation and clearance of liver fat. The preclinical data was presented in the fall of 2020 as a poster session at The Liver Meeting® Digital Experience hosted by American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and published as abstract #1679 in Hepatology: Vol 72, No S1. 

The release continued:

IIn preclinical studies, NTC and NTF acted as potent HNF4a activators, promoting fat clearance from the steatotic livers of mice fed a high fat diet, by inducing lipophagy.  HNF4a is a central metabolic regulator that is impaired by elevated levels of fat in the bloodstream resulting from chronic overeating. Administered in proper doses, NTC and NTF restored proper function of this central metabolic regulator, including maintaining healthy lipid and sugar levels in the bloodstream to normalize organ function. Their activities were confirmed using a cell-based human insulin promoter activation assay. Forager found NTC and NTF in over 80 common edible plant sources. 

One of those plant sources, Brightseed Co-Founder and CEO, Jim Flatt told me by phone this week, is black pepper. Now, before you run out and grab your pepper grinder, there is still a lot of work that remains before the results of this discovery bear out.

First, the compounds still need to go through clinical trials to validate Brightseed’s initial findings. This includes not only confirming any health benefits, but also determining the doses and best methods for administering the compounds. Then the best plant source for those compounds needs to be determined as well as the best method for compound extraction. Flatt told me that if all goes well, you can expect to see some form of supplement on the market by the end of 2022.

Even though that is a ways off, part of the reason to be excited by today’s announcement is because of how little time it took Brightseed to make this particular discovery. Through its computational processes, Flatt told me his company was able to shrink what used to take years down to months. “Fifteen to 20 percent of time that is computational saves us 80 percent of the time in the lab,” Flatt said.

Brightseed has already analyzed roughly 700,000 compounds in the plant world for health properties and says it’s on track to surpass 10 million by 2025. Doing so could help unlock a number of previously unknown treatments for a number of ailments and conditions as well as general improvement to our metabolic and immuno health.

In addition to independent research such as today’s findings, Brightseed also partners with major CPG brands to help them identify new applications for their products. For instance, Danone is using Brightseed’s technology to help find new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed’s announcement today also reinforces the bigger role AI will play in our food system. AI and machine learning is being used to do everything from turning data into cheese, to solving complex issues around protein folding.

As more discoveries using AI are made, more investment will be poured into the space, which will accelerate even more discoveries.

Brightseed Raises $27M for its AI-Based Phytonutrient Discovery

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to aid food companies in the discovery of new nutritional compounds in plants, announced today that it has raised $27 million in new funding. The round was led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood and brings the total amount raised by Brightseed to $52 million.

According to Brightseed, just 1 percent of the compounds produced by plants is known. Brightseed’s Forager AI tool looks at plants on a molecular level to reveal these hidden phytonutrient compounds (examples of phytonutrients include caffeine in coffee and antioxidants in blueberries). Once discovered, Forager adds it to its database as uses that information to make predictions about any implications those new phytonutrients may have for human health.

In June of this year, Brightseed announced a partnership with Danone, which owns Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, to discover new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed is actually in the middle of three converging food tech trends right now. First, sales of plant-based food has surged during the pandemic, so the ability to mine plant-based resources to excavate new, additional nutrition benefits could help sustain that growth.

Second, Brightseed is part of a growing movement of using AI to model and predict unique attributes of food. Spoonshot is using AI to help companies create whole products via data before they even begin prototyping in the real world. And Climax Foods, which recently launched, is using data and AI to develop new plant-based foods, starting with cheese.

The idea with all these AI tools is to do a lot of the heavy lifting via algorithm before experimenting in the more costly real world lab setting. We’re still very early on in this trend, so it remains to be see how effective AI modeling really is.

Finally, Brightseed is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which has people paying more attention to the types of food they consume. In particular, Brightseed is looking at how phytonutrients it discovers can help with metabolic health, cognitive health, immune health, bone health.

Brightseed’s financial health is certainly robust with today’s announcement. The company will be using its new bulked up warchest to invest in R&D of its AI and commercialization of its plant-based discoveries in the food and beverage sectors.

Danone to Use Brightseed’s AI to Uncover New Health Benefits of Soy and Other Plants

Danone North America and Brightseed announced today that they have formed a partnership to use Brightseed’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform to profile and uncover health benefits of key plant sources.

Part of the food as medicine movement, Brightseed is a three-year-old San Francisco startup that examines plants on a molecular level to uncover hidden phytonutrients that can contribute to healthier lifestyles. As it uncovers compounds, Brightseed’s AI platform is then used to predict what impact they will have on the human body.

An example of a phytonutritional compound would be something like the caffeine in coffee or the antioxidants in blueberries.

“We use AI to illuminate the dark matter of nutrition,” Sofia Elizondo, Co-Founder and COO of Brightseed told me by phone this week. “Once you have completed this circle of knowledge. You can transform the food ecosystem.”

Elizondo explained that Brightseed’s platform works for both the sourcing and production sides of CPGs. On the ag side, it can help identify healthy compounds and encourage plant breeding to maximize those benefits. For CPG companies, Brightseed can help source plants that are beneficial and reveal new phytonutrients in existing plant ingredients around which new products can be built.

The partnership with Danone, which owns the Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, will start with Brightseed turning its AI on soy to illuminate the unknown health benefits of soy.

Brightseed, which has raised and undisclosed sum of venture funding, is among a wave of companies using AI to unlock new understandings of our food. Other companies like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems are using AI to help predict flavor trends and novel food combinations.

But while those companies are looking at existing data, Brightseed is building an entirely new body of data from which entirely new discoveries can be made.

“A lot of technology in our field is built to manipulate nature,” Elizondo said, “There is so much more to learn from what nature has already provided.”