Nium: Developing The Most Sophisticated Model Of Human Digestion

Adam Selamnia, Strategic Advisor & Business Developer, and Alberto Noronha, CEO of Nium (Photo © Stephanie Jabardo / Silicon Luxembourg)

In recent years, the human gut and its constituent bacteria have attracted a lot of attention for their medical potential. Nium, a University of Luxembourg spin-off, has produced a ‘gut-on-a-chip’ with which it aims to support the food and medical industry in testing its products. Co-founder and CEO Alberto Noronha tells us more about Nium’s journey and his hopes for the future.

What is it about the gut that has made it gain so much attention in recent years?

Over the last decade or so, there is more and more research which has shown that the gut is a good indicator of general health. We’ve also been discovering that it is related to so many things that are happening in your body – they talk about the gut-brain axis – and that it influences many things such as your mood responses and your appetite. Next to your brain, it’s the place with the most neural receptors and it has become widely accepted that the microbiome has a deep influence on your well-being.

What milestones have you achieved since first founding Nium in 2019?

When we first started Nium, we were still running the research project for the University of Luxembourg. After working out our POC, we started generating revenue quite soon by working for food companies which were testing out new ingredient formulations or new products to help them predict their metabolic impact.

Learning about the food industry was important for us because we plan on working with more regulated markets such as healthcare in the future. From a purely data analytics perspective, we also learnt that it was more efficient to develop our own lab protocols and experiments which is why we developed a device that emulates the gastrointestinal tract. We call this our ‘gut-on-a-chip’, which works together with a platform we developed.

This ‘gut-on-a-chip’ is basically a miniaturised gut that allows us to test the efficacy of food products. It is a lot more cost-effective and scalable than current solutions because it’s smaller and faster. Our solution takes 12-48 hours whereas the current standard is 4-8 weeks. Currently, we’re starting our first pilot projects with our ‘gut-on-a-chip’, opening our own lab and continuing to add to our first funding round which we started in April 2022.

What are you trying to achieve with Nium?

We want to develop the most sophisticated model of human digestion because we believe that these models will play an important role in the future development of food and healthcare products. We’re starting with fermentation by looking at dietary fibres, probiotics and other compounds that reach the gut and have an impact.

We’re targeting companies that are developing these types of health products as our solution supports them in screening their products’ impacts and functional features. So we provide a set of services based on this data we get from the ‘gut-on-a-chip’ which is about the size of a large microwave oven.

How exactly does this ‘gut-on-a-chip work’?

We feed the ‘gut-on-a-chip’ a stool sample, and then after 12-48 hours, we look at the differences between the microbiome itself and its composition. We also look for compounds that are associated with good gut health which, in the end, allows us to give the product a probiotic score and helps the food company decide whether they want to continue the development of their product or not.

You’ve mentioned the development of a software platform. What does it do?

Firstly, our platform enables us to analyse the composition of the biome in question, both before and after the experiment. Secondly, we try to model what is happening so that we can replicate or better understand the reactions taking place. This includes developing a metabolic modelling framework where we look at this community of microbes. It’s like Google Maps for the human metabolism. The more accurate our model becomes the better our insights into the product development cycle.

What can you tell me about the research you engage in with public institutions?

We are currently collaborating in a study with the LIH, a clinical trial looking at the impact of high versus low-fibre diets. Although ‘food as medicine’ is a trendy word nowadays, it is also an important one and our technological developments will definitely benefit clinical research too. I think there’s so much that can be done in the field, not only in Luxembourg but also beyond.

What scientific discoveries have been made that have contributed to the rise in personalised health solutions?

The cost of DNA sequencing has been going down a lot which has enabled us to not only learn more about the human genome but also the microbial genome. So the amount of data that we can measure has increased rapidly and while the insights we can gather from it are still lagging a bit behind, we are currently building tools which will help us get more precise insights and be able to improve our understanding of human health.

Where do you hope to see Nium in five years?

We definitely want to have our platform firmly established and sell our first devices to food companies. We also want to have validated a couple of applications for the improved treatment of cancer because I think our solutions hold a lot of potential in this area. We’re not here to replace any current solutions, only to support or improve the outcome of treatments. Lastly, we want to improve the food ecosystem as a whole which is also why we only work with companies that fit our values and pursue the development of healthier alternatives.

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