Fonterra and VitaKey partner to enhance dairy's health benefits

Looking to a future where it is likely that many foods will be more valued for their specific health benefits, Fonterra and VitaKey Inc. have announced a dairy science collaboration to further unlock the benefits of Fonterra’s probiotic strains.

VitaKey specialises in precision delivery of nutrition — an emerging area of research that seeks to deliver the right nutrients, in the right amount, to the right part of the body at the right time.

Co-founded by Dr Robert Langer, the VitaKey delivery technology platform for nutrients is based on technology licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and developed at the Langer Lab, the largest academic biomedical engineering lab in the world.

Using VitaKey’s technology, Fonterra is looking to design dairy products that incorporate targeted and time-controlled release of specific dairy nutrients, starting with probiotics, in a way that locks in the freshness for longer and allows the nutrients to be more active and beneficial in the body.

Judith Swales, CEO for Fonterra’s Asia–Pacific region, said Fonterra is “home to one of the largest dairy culture libraries in the world; our Research and Development Centre contains more than 40,000 strains. Two of these strains, LactoB 001 and BifidoB 019, address key health concerns such as digestive issues and immunity and are recognised as being in the top five global probiotics.

“By partnering with VitaKey, we aim to ‘make nature better’ by combining the goodness of our New Zealand milk with VitaKey’s technology.

“Because the nutrients are encapsulated and highly targeted, it also means we can use less milk in our production, making our milk go further while reducing food waste,” Swales said.

The first step in the collaboration aims to stabilise probiotics and deliver them to the digestive tract. This will leverage related MIT technology developed in the Langer Lab that NASA may use to deliver probiotics to astronauts in their planned mission to Mars.

The VitaKey delivery platform has already been shown to preserve and enhance 11 different micronutrients, including Vitamin D, A, B12 and C as well as iron, zinc, niacin and folic acid. Fonterra intends to leverage the technology across a range of micronutrients, such as Vitamin D, and introduce them into its products.

Image caption: VitaKey co-founders Dr Robert Langer and Dr Ana Jaklenec of the MIT Langer Lab with VitaKey researcher Stephanie Tomasic.