A.I. platform Canomiks partners with startup accelerator
Canomiks, based in at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, was cofounded by Leena Pradhan-Nabzydk, PhD, MBA, who serves as the company’s CEO. Pradhan-Nabzydk earned a doctoral degree in pharmacology from Tulane University and serves as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.
Ingredient development powered by A.I.
Canomiks says its platform, which marries genomics, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence (A.I.) approaches, can help ingredient developers and dietary supplement manufacturers find ways to validate new ingredients to provide product differentiation and better health outcomes.
The company’s approach, which has been under development since 2015, was attractive enough to induce Ocean Spray earlier this year to engage the company in a project to further research and validate the biological efficacy of cranberry components.
KiwiTech, for its part, bills itself as a platform that brings together more than 5,000 investors and 500 portfolio companies across 15 different business sectors. Financial details of the new partnership were not disclosed.
"We are honored to partner with the world-leading team of academics and scientists at Canomiks led by Dr. Leena," said Rakesh Gupta, CEO & Founder of KiwiTech. “As part of this partnership, we’ll combine our deep experience of building and scaling emerging tech startups with Canomiks intellectual property and groundbreaking technology to transform the functional food and beverage and dietary supplement industry.”
“We will also provide Canomiks with access to our network of investors, mentors, and industry experts to assist them on their way forward,” he added.
"By joining forces with KiwiTech, Canomiks is now very strongly positioned to make an impact with our genomics, bioinformatics, and AI-based product superiority platform, enabling our customers to achieve product differentiation, solve ingredient supply chain challenges, and mitigate brand and compliance risk,” Pradhan-Nabzydk added.
The rising A.I. tide
Canomiks is at the forefront of a growing push to adapt A.I. to the development of nutritional products. What in theory distinguishes A.I. from the increasingly sophisticated algorithms that have been employed for decades would be the platform’s ability to learn as it goes along and to expand beyond its original programming inputs. In this way it could find new relationships that were not foreseen by its creators.
This approach is being used in the realm of personalized nutrition and sports nutrition. For example, LifeNome, a New York City-based company, is using the technology to find new ways to integrate an individual’s genetic and epigenetic profile with the use of specific nutrients, wearable devices and other factors to create a truly personalized approach to wellness.
