Synergies
EIC Pathfinder Challenge Portfolio on Precision Nutrition
The EIC Precision Nutrition Portfolio brings together eight research projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Precision Nutrition” call. With a strong focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, the portfolio aims to translate research into real-world applications, maximizing societal and market impact.
The EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Precision Nutrition” is an initiative of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Work Programme 2023 supporting research on nutrition, the gut microbiome, and glycans. It aims to develop personalized dietary guidelines that consider individual factors such as age, gender, and genetics, ultimately improving health and preventing disease.
The Portfolio approach aims to foster collaboration, facilitate data sharing, and enhance synergies among participating teams. Four working groups, each composed of representative from each of the eight projects, are building synergies on the following aspects:
- Business Development
- Communication and Dissemination
- Regulatory activities and clinical trials
- Technological synergies
Bugs4urate
The Bugs4Urate project project explores how diet, glycans, and gut microbiota affect urate metabolism to create safer, more effective hyperuricemia treatments and prevent gout.
Gout is a painful disease caused by high blood urate, often linked to diet and metabolic imbalance. Current treatments have limitations.
Bugs4Urate introduces a precision nutrition approach using probiotics, dietary fibres, and patient stratification to reduce serum urate levels and address gout’s root causes with targeted microbiome-based strategies.
DiBan
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is characterised by insulin resistance or insufficient insulin production, resulting in high blood glucose levels. An imbalance in the intestinal microbiota (intestinal dysbiosis) is one factor driving the progression of insulin resistance to T2D. Furthermore, intestinal dysbiosis is linked to poor nutrition. The EIC-funded DiBaN project aims to fight dysbiosis and T2D using novel nutrients prepared from ‘metabolically healthy’ insects to promote a healthy microbiome-host metabolic interface. To do so, they will develop advanced ex vivo platforms faithfully simulating in vivo dysbiosis and insulin resistance to overcome current limitations in nutrient testing. An AI-based application using the project’s data should be able to predict individuals’ responses to nutritional interventions.
GLUCOTYPES
GLUCOTYPES is redefining how we approach type 2 diabetes prevention. By combining advanced glucose monitoring, molecular biology, and machine learning, this EIC-funded project aims to identify unique blood sugar patterns –defined as “glucotypes”– that can provide early insights into disease development and lay the foundation for personalized nutrition strategies. Led by a multidisciplinary team from across Europe, the project combines cutting-edge science with a shared commitment to improving health.
MENTORING for HEALTH
MENTORING for HEALTH represents a groundbreaking initiative in the field of precision nutrition, particularly in its focus on lung cancer patients. By integrating diverse data sets from genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, the project aims to provide personalized dietary recommendations that address the unique nutritional needs of each patient. The project’s innovations in both technology and methodology promise to revolutionize the approach to cancer care, potentially reducing the economic burden of the disease while improving the quality of life and survival rates of patients.
The project’s interdisciplinary nature, combined with its focus on digital health and precision nutrition, positions it to make substantial contributions to the broader field of non- communicable diseases, offering hope for more effective and personalized treatments in the future.
FIBRE-MATCH
Increasing dietary fibre intake is crucial for supporting the production of beneficial metabolites by the gut microbiota. Metabolism of fibers also produces gases, which can cause gastrointestinal symptoms. The main aim of the FIBRE- MATCH project is to match dietary fibre types to gut microbiome subtypes to minimize digestive symptoms. This involves identifying major fibre-metabolising microbiome types in Europeans and their metabolic outputs from common dietary fibres and developing fermented microbiome-tailored fibre-rich foods to study whether they can be eaten without gastrointestinal symptoms. The project will develop a database on the contents of different dietary fibres in foods and evaluate the impact of microbiota-matched dietary fibre on non-communicable disease risk markers and habitual fibre intake.
NutriEV
The NutriEV investigates the complex interactions between nutritional extracellular vesicles, gut cells, the microbiome, and their vesicles, aiming to understand their role in gut health, obesity, and metabolic regulation through in vitro, in vivo, and clinical studies.
Extracellular vesicles have been identified in sweat, exhibiting unique molecular signatures that enable non-invasive biomonitoring technologies to assess nutritional impacts.
By leveraging nutriEV molecular data, the project intends to create algorithms that enhance dietary guidelines and test a novel hypothesis regarding the impact of diet on health, particularly through plant-derived EVs.
NUTRIMMUNE
Obesity is associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and increased infection risks. However, the exact impact of nutrition on immune responses is not fully understood. The EIC-funded NUTRIMMUNE project aims to explore how dietary factors influence immune responses in individuals with varying degrees of obesity-related NCD severity. The project will assess the relationship between nutrition, the glycome, the microbiome, and immune health in the context of obesity and immune impairment. A key focus is a 24-week precision nutritional intervention designed to evaluate the potential of a pro-immune diet in restoring T cell health in obese individuals. NUTRIMMUNE will identify predictive markers and signatures of altered immunity and dietary patterns that affect immune function. Additionally, the project ensures efficient management, ethics compliance and the dissemination and exploitation of its findings.
InteractHoMiG
Glycans, namely human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), play crucial roles in the functions of the gut, metabolism, and immunity. While HMOs are vital in infant development and exhibit bioactive properties in adults, it is required to analyze and decode their functions in depth.
The current joint project by Utrecht University and Inbiose aims to identify novel glycosyltransferase enzymes, produce previously inaccessible HMOs, test glycan-microbe interactions in an ex vivo simulated gut microenvironment, decode direct and indirect effects of HMOs on the gut barrier in an in vitro cell model, and integrate the host-microbe-glycan interplay (“the triangle of sweetness”) in a human-microbial crosstalk (HuMiX) model. Thanks to powerful statistical methods, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques, we envision a thorough understanding about glycan structure-function relationship and predict their potential applications with stratifications based on gender, diet, and health conditions. We expect to validate at least one HMO alleviating impact of inflammation under two diets that is ready for a clinical trial. Cutting-edge Omics methods and data analysis pipelines will allow us to understand better the host-microbe-glycan triangle, and will provide both a wealth of research data and an expanded range of HMOs as research tools and potential therapeutics and/or preventives in human non-communicable diseases and food-related health conditions.