According to the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP), postbiotics are defined as a “preparation of inanimate microorganisms and/or their components that confers a health benefit on the host”.
While there remains some debate around the definition, the market potential is clear: The global postbiotic market was valued at $1.6 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $3 billion by 2031, according to Allied Market Research (a lack of agreement around the definition makes accurate market sizing a challenge).
ADM has a long standing interest in postbiotics via the Biopolis business it acquired in 2017, explained Dr. Richard Day, vice president of medical affairs & clinical development for health & wellness at ADM.
“There’s a bit of first mover advantage there, and we have this team in Valencia in Spain who are really world experts in developing postbiotics,” Dr. Day told NutraIngredients at the IPA World Congress + Probiota in Copenhagen. “So, we’ve got a great pipeline of new postbiotics coming through, and then it’s up to my team to get their clinical data to demonstrate their efficacy, and that’s what we’re working on at the moment.”
ADM already has a few postbiotics in its collection, he said, and the science shows that two patterns of effects depending on which probiotic strain and which postbiotic is studied.
“We have one which is a Bifidobacterium longum, the brand name is ES1, and we recently published a three arm RCT that included both the live probiotic and the heat treated postbiotic, and it was in a population of adults with diarrhea predominant IBS,” he said. “Now what was interesting in that study is across pretty much all of the end points, we saw an almost equivalent effect for both the probiotic and the postbiotic. I think that that’s very interesting and indeed probably unexpected because, really across a range of endpoints, we did see an almost identical profile for that specific postbiotic in that population.
“Then if you contrast that with another one of our postbiotics, that’s a B. lactis, brand name is BPL1, and again, we had a three arm RCT, and this one used the live probiotic and the heat treated postbiotic. In that one, we saw subtly different clinical effects. That particular probiotic and postbiotic has been studied in a lot of metabolic endpoints, and in those trials, we saw slightly more positive effects around glucose homeostasis for the postbiotic, whereas for the probiotic, we saw a slightly bigger effect for reductions in BMI, for example.
“So, across the portfolio, depending on the postbiotic and depending on the population, we do see either near identical effects or very different effects.”
Pets, too
In the last couple of years, ADM has also moved into research for postbiotics for pets, Dr. Day said, previewing a paper currently under peer-review that explores the role of another postbiotic (L. plantarum) in a model of canine oral health.
“Our team in Valencia in Spain, they ran a whole host of pre-clinical assays which identified this particular L. plantarum as being interesting for oral health," he said. “And then we, my team, we ran a clinical trial in in dogs, and in that we actually saw that the postbiotic reduced the accumulation of plaque in dogs that received the postbiotic as part of their normal diet—so super interesting and starting to generate the postbiotic data in pets.”
Watch the video for the full interview.
