Cognis licenses functional food ingredients form IMD

Collaboration | Licensing

Cognis, a supplier of specialty chemicals and nutritional ingredients, and InterMed Discovery (IMD), a natural product lead-discovery company, have announced that Cognis has licensed two further product candidates from IMD, a new functional food ingredient for weight management, and another that has beneficial effects on the heart.

IMD’s technology platform can correlate chemical structures with biological activity on a broad scale, and during an ongoing collaboration the two German companies have used this to identify functional ingredients for specific food applications.

“Both ingredients exhibit very promising in vitro and preclinical in vivo results. Extract development has been finalised and subsequent safety studies are now under way,” says Sigrid Krämer, project manager.

Thomas Henkel, Managing Director of InterMed Discovery, said “The discovery of these new ingredients proves the strength of IMD’s food ingredient pipeline as well as the power of our technology platform in generating a sustainable stream of innovative product candidates in a short period of time.”

Intermed, of Dortmund, Germany was founded in 2006 as a management buyout of the Natural Products Research Unit of Bayer Healthcare.