Finding Medical Miracles in Nature
Excitement is building around NuMe Health, a biotechnology company specializing in the arena of medical foods and one of four current start-up ventures from the New Orleans BioInnovation Center incubator.
“We want to be the premiere medical food company for chronic indications such as cancer, obesity and diabetes,” explained Justin Peno, the director of business development of NuMe Health.
Founded in July 2009 by Dale Pfost and John Elstrott, two highly successful entrepreneurs in the biotechnology and functional food industries, NuMe Health promises to become a major player in the rapidly growing market of medical foods. Pfost, president and C.E.O., is a longtime biotech entrepreneur, while Elstrott, chairman of the company, has experience as a founding investor of Silk Soy Milk, Whole Foods, and other functional food enterprises.
“With their backgrounds, we aim to be a leading biotech company that focuses on this niche called medical food,” said Peno. “The medical food market is growing at about 25 percent annually. We see it as an excellent opportunity to contribute to improved health through preventative approaches that cost the healthcare system less.”
As a former NOBIC fellow, Peno was involved in the collaboration of research and commercialization from which NuMe Health traces its roots.
So how exactly does one differentiate medical food from drugs or from dietary goods? According to Peno, it is a particular class of product regulated by the FDA. “It’s a very specific and narrowly defined product area,” he said.
Medical foods differ from over-the-counter supplements and “functional foods,” such as orange juice fortified with calcium, which are more familiar to the average consumer. “Medical foods address the dietary deficiencies of a patient in certain disease states,” Peno explained. “Medical food compounds have to be found in nature,” he said. “Ours is found in activated soy.”
The company’s first initiative focuses on medical food for diabetes, obesity and breast cancer patients and survivors, based upon an anti-estrogenic compound found in activated soybeans, known as glyceollin.
“The project started as a collaborative effort between Tulane University and the USDA here in New Orleans, and it has been worked on for the good portion of a decade,” said Peno. “They started looking into the phytoalexins of soybeans, and it winds up that one of the compounds, glyceollin, is shaped rather remarkably similar to estrogen. It turns out that it’s best known natural anti-estrogen.”
Currently, premenopausal breast cancer survivors enter into a five-year regimen of tamoxifen, which has strong anti-estrogenic effects on the breasts and bones, but has a potentially harmful estrogenic effect on the uterus.
“In looking at glyceollin, they saw that it acts like an anti-estrogen in both the breast and the uterus,” he explained. “We see the potential for breast cancer survivors that are off of tamoxifen who would still like to do something proactive.”
The long-term opportunity for glyceollin in medical food is clear, and providing this scientifically proven compound to help solve dietary deficiencies of breast cancer survivors is one of NuMe Health’s initial goals.
However, that is only a part of their business plan. Future medical food ventures for the dietary deficiencies of obesity and diabetes are also on the horizon. “We’re working to submit an SBIR grant to study the feasibility of the [glyceollin] compound on insulin and see if it would serve as a viable pre-diabetic food.”
Among the pioneering companies from the NOBIC start-up incubator, NuMe Health is poised to become a fast leader in the rapidly growing medical food market. “We see investor interest growing,” said Peno. “It’s branching out for all of us, but we’re all excited to be learning so much about this niche called medical food.”
