Blog 1: Idea Generation

Blog 1: Idea Generation.

On week one two others and myself, Aidan & Shane, were assigned to work with the company Nutriplus. Nutriplus is a bioprocessing company that deals with nutraceuticals. One of our group members, Shane, has previously worked in the bioprocessing industry when he worked in a brewery so this already gives us an upper hand within the company. 

Our first team assignment set up a number of tasks for us to tackle. These included understanding the nutraceuticals industry, identifying a new target market, discussing the past, present & future of nutraceuticals and lastly to review some scientific literature.

These were valuable tasks in my eyes as I was never 100% sure what nutraceuticals actually were. To put it vaguely the results I found were that a nutraceutical product are products isolated from food and sold in supplemented form.

We then decided to pick a product to develop and as the other member of our group, Aidan, has Crohn's disease, we thus decided to create a product which helps prevent the IBD symptoms, as Crohn’s is an incurable disease. What the idea entails is supplementing the strain Kefir into an Actimal type drink.

Kefir is a type of probiotic except it is considered to be much stronger. With probiotics for Crohn's disease, the idea is to have so called, “good” bacteria to go head to head with “bad” bacteria in your gut to help ease inflammation. Probiotics are already available as supplements in capsules, tablets, or powders at health stores. The advantage of probiotic foods over supplements is that they contain live active cultures. It is presumed that live cultures are more effective than supplemented ones, as the supplemented cultures have to be dried out. However, bacteria that are dried remain dormant and will start to grow again after coming in contact with the moisture in your intestines.

I will go into this in more detail in further blogs but that’s all for today I’ll leave a link below of where I got most of my information for anyone who wants to look into Kefir and probiotics further and get a little teaser into next weeks blog.

Crohn's and Probiotics: Fighting Back With Good Bacteria | Everyday Health. 2015. Crohn's and Probiotics: Fighting Back With Good Bacteria | Everyday Health. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.everydayhealth.com/hs/crohns-disease-treatment-management/crohns-probiotics-good-bacteria/. [Accessed 07 October 2015].