Canada has an extensive range of research centres, food incubators, accelerators and labs supporting food and beverage innovation through the research they do and/or the services they offer. Each week throughout 2023, we’ll be highlighting an organization that's supporting food innovation in Canada.
Name: The In Vitro Digestion Platform, part of INAF (Institute of Nutrition and Functional Foods) at Laval University in Quebec City, QC.
Focus: The lab studies the impact of the digestion system on bioactive compounds.
Mission: To carry out realistic preclinical studies on the impacts of digestion and microbiota on healthy ingredients or functional foods.
Services: Research on digestion and inaccessibility of dietary fibre, nutrients, and proteins, research on probiotics, encapsulated molecules, and more.
What you need to know: The lab offers five digestion models to study digestion and to simulate gut flora, including TIM-1, a sophisticated in vitro unit which simulates digestion conditions in the stomach and small intestine. Bioreactors used in conjunction are used to simulate the physiological conditions of the large intestine. According to the lab, the simulation allows researchers to see the proportion of assimilated molecules, to test galenic formulas, to evaluate the potential of pre- and probiotics, to identify the metabolites produced during digestion and to determine the influence of the compound or its derivatives on the intestinal microbiota. The lab’s digestion model allows food companies to conduct preclinical studies without the use of animal or human studies, with controllable digestion parameters, easy sampling, highly reproductible results, and reduced costs.
Notable Numbers: The lab has delivered approximately 40 large-scale projects and 10 industry-funded projects in the past six years. Some examples of completed projects include: The determination of antioxidants in berry juices to optimize the fortification parameters of a specialized beverage for a company; the determination of several bioactive molecules in broccoli grown in different ways to establish the most optimal cultivation methods to improve their nutritional value; and verification of the bioavailability of antioxidant molecules in blood plasma and tissues after consumption of healthy ingredients.
Get involved: Contact INAF at info@inaf.ulaval.ca or reach out to CFIN's Regional Innovation Director (Quebec), Julie Daigle.
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