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The Red Tecnomifood executes 3.25 million euros in contracts with companies in omic technologies applied to innovation in functional foods and nutraceuticals

The Red TecnomiFood, created within the framework of the first aid line of the Cervera Program and led by the Eurecat technology center, has generated a pioneering collaborative research model in Europe to promote omic technologies in industry, which has allowed centers technological organizations that make it up, execute 3.25 million euros in contracts with companies in omic technologies applied to the innovation and development of functional foods and nutraceuticals, an amount that is expected to reach around 5.25 million euros by the end of 2022.

 

Since the creation of the Red Tecnomifood in 2020, public funding for R&D projects in which omic technologies applied to food and nutrition play an important role stood at 13.4 million euros at the end of 2021 and, at the end of the 2022 financial year, it is expected to reach 17.5 million euros, doubling the initial forecasts, as reflected in the report “The impact of the Cervera projects: the success of cooperation in R&D&I ”, prepared by Fedit.

 

Regarding the number of full-time researchers, according to the Fedit study, there are 92 full-time researchers who work in omics technologies in network centers, exceeding initial forecasts by 23 percent.

 

The Red TecnomiFood project, led by Eurecat, brings together the AZTI, AINIA, ANFACO–CECOPESCA and CNTA-National Center for Technology and Security centers, with the aim of “facilitating companies’ access to omic technologies, to help them innovate in functional foods, nutraceuticals and ingredients that are effective, safe and beneficial”, points out the director of the Eurecat Biotechnology Area, Dr. Antoni Caimari. The key is to favor business access at all stages of value “from the design, development and demonstration of the healthy potential of an ingredient to the production of a functional food or nutraceutical”, he indicates.

 

The consumer demands a healthy, sustainable, safe and personalized food market. The challenge is to “understand the organism well and move from nutrition based on dietary guidelines intended for the general population, suitable for the entire population, but which does not always give the results required, to another adapted to each individual (precision nutrition personalized) or to groups of individuals with similar metabolisms (group precision nutrition)”, explains Antoni Caimari.

 

In any case, despite its potential, the incorporation of omic technologies into research and business development in the healthy eating sector is still limited. For this reason, “the Red TecnomiFood was promoted, to make available to the industrial sector a system of technological centers in cooperation that brings together, in a single infrastructure, everything necessary to solve difficulties, take advantage of opportunities and anticipate ingredient trends. and functional foods”, points out the director of the Eurecat Biotechnology Area.

 

Thus, the network “allowed us to position the centers that support companies in this area, not only in the Spanish agri-food sector, but also by being pioneers in a way of working at a European level, by integrating the differential capacities of each center in each one of the omics”, indicates the scientific director of the Eurecat Biotechnology Area, Dr. Francesc Puiggròs.

 

Regarding the transfer of technology, the main objective was “to learn to work together and develop a workflow, so that high-performance models have increased to put them at the service of companies”, points out Francesc Puiggròs. Looking to the future, they want to give it continuity and “there are ways to do it”, such as “incorporating more artificial intelligence in the future, which will allow combining what each center still does separately”.

 

The Red TecnomiFood project consortium is led by Eurecat, through its Nutrition and Health and Omic Sciences units, a mixed R+D+i unit made up of professionals from said center and from the Rovira i Virgili University, together with AZTI, AINIA, CNTA-National Center for Technology and Food Safety and ANFACO-CECOPESCA.

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