Test to check health benefits of foods

A validated test to measure if a specialty food or supplement has health benefits in humans has been developed by scientists from NIZO in close collaboration with Wageningen University & Research and FrieslandCampina Research & Development.

The test is based on the immunological response to vaccination with a commercially available oral cholera vaccine.

The model measures several different vaccine-specific antibody responses, for example, in nasal mucosa and blood of volunteers, after vaccination with the commercially available human cholera vaccine Dukoral. Vaccination with Dukoral is known to be suboptimal, resulting in a gradual and transient increase in anti-cholera immune response over time and to protect around 60–70% of the vaccinated population, making this model suitable to be used for health research purposes.

The model will be applied by NIZO in clinical dietary intervention trials to prove general and high-level health benefits, by subjecting healthy volunteers to a controlled challenge. This research generates human data on clinical outcomes as early as possible in the development of new food products. The newly developed oral cholera vaccination model is currently available at NIZO as one of the possible human challenge models for use in clinical food trials.

The research findings were published recently in Mucosal Immunology.

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