4th Animal Gut Health & Nutrition Summit 2021

Elizabeth Santin, VP, R&D Jefo Nutrition Inc.; Sherry Layton, CEO Vetanco USA

Depending on what animal type you are targeting your product on, your objectives will differ, i.e. in livestock to increase production efficiency or companion animals to improve behavior or gut health. Therefore, translating developments in the human space or across animals may not be effective.

This workshop will:

• Help you understand microbiome difference between companion and production animals, and what is the best profile for the different objectives associated with each animal species (i.e. weight gain, meat production, health and well-being).

• Explore how these differences drive alternative research and development strategies.

• Understanding what are the nutrients or additives that best modulate the microbiome according to animal performance.

Arvind Kumar, Discovery Biology - Microbial Research, Global Research & Exploratory Development Elanco

German Plata, Research Scientist, Systems Biology Elanco

• Functional footprint of microbial communities in chicken feed four distinct types of AGPs

• Condition-specific metabolic modelling and analysis of the core cecum microbiome

• Untargeted metabolomics in support of specific mechanisms of improved bird performance

Kevin Bolek, Microbials Innovation Director Phibro Animal Health Corp.

• Discussing the variation in gut microbiome in response to multiple types of enteric infections

• Learning how the gut microbiome influences the immune response (locally and systemically) and affects resolution

• Benchmarking how host microbiome correlates to susceptibility or resistance to an enteric infection

This is your long-awaited opportunity to network with your peers! Take part to catch-up with old friends, meet new faces, and connect with those who can assist your R&D efforts.

Scott Carter, VP, Microbial Business Phibro Animal Health Corp.

• Effectively commercializing a new microbial product for microbiome impact is much ore than just a successful fermentation process, and is full of many pitfalls along the way

• Discussing more broadly, the problems and challenges you may encounter when scaling-up production

• Establishing a good framework for the variety of challenges you face when scaling-up production

Yemi Adesokan, CSO Gnubiotics; Jeff Henkes, Senior Director, Marketing Native Microbials; Anita Menconi, Technical Services Manager, Gut Health Evonik; Xandra Smith, Research Manager Arm and Hammer Animal Feed and Food Production; Ryan Honaker, Director, Microbiology NomNomNow

• What were the top 3 lessons that you learnt from commercializing your product?

• What role does understood mode of action play in communicating your product?

• How can education of veterinarians be improved to make them more aware of gut health and its importance?

Tom Rehberger, Director, Innovation & Product Development Arm & Hammer Animal Feed & Food Production; Scott Carter, VP, Microbial Business Phibro Animal Health Corp.; Marcos Rostagno, Director, Technical & Regulatory Services Phytobiotics North America LLC; Brenda de Rodas, Director, Swine Technical Innovation Purina Animal Nutrition

• How do you design your product into the systems that already exist?

• What needs are not being met by products currently on the market?

• What performance criteria do they have with regard to evaluating new products?

• What operational challenges do they have in bringing in new products to their systems?

Yemi Adesokan, CSO & Co-Founder Gnubiotics

• Identifying novel markers of pet obesity

• Discovering new species and strains that predict canine and feline obesity

• Developing novel consortia for obesity treatment

Damien Preveraud, Global Scientific Manager Adisseo France SAS

• Gut health is a very complex issue with the microbiota, diet and host response involved

• Not only disease, but ever more important intestinal integrity and inflammation are decreasing performance

• Some biomarkers are key to consider in the evaluation of health status of the animal

Michael Kogut, Research Microbiologist & Lead Scientist USDA-ARS

• Research should move away from descriptive, associative studies which have not established causality

• All gut health research geared towards restoring missing functions or eliminating harmful functions

• Regulating gut health directly affects tissue physiology other than the intestine

Katie Schoenberg, Senior Advisor, Next Generation Development & Chair, Global Diversity Equity & Inclusion Council Elanco

• How diverse perspectives positively influence science and innovation

• The diversity, equity and inclusion journey within our industry

• Actions that can be taken right now to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at an organization and individual level

Jennifer Radosevich, Worldwide Director, Research Hill’s Pet Nutrition

• Exploring how to take bioinformatic data and extract meaningful insights from it

• Outlining the advantages that using metagenomics has over alternative methods

Shaimaa Ahmed, Product Manager Diversigen

• The lack of complete animal-specific databases for microbiome studies has limited our understanding of the animal microbiome

• Diversigen has developed MetaGene™ Mouse, a mouse-specific shotgun metagenomic sequencing pipeline and a mouse-specific microbiome database that significantly improve the detection and identification of bacterial species and strains unique to mice, outperforming publically available databases

• MetaGene™ Mouse increases the overall median mapping rate from 12% to 45%. Furthermore, it increases the understanding of the microbiome function thanks to a 5-fold increase in functional mapping rate based on our mouse-specific database.

• The approach we took with the mouse microbiome can be applied to any animal species, including companion, and production, to facilitate a better understanding of each animal’s unique microbiome

Emmanuelle Apper, Global R&D Manager Centers of Excellence Lallemand

• Microbiome, performance, health and sustainability, our current challenges

• From correlations to causation: how OMICs methods can help?

• A lot of promises but also still a lot of challenges

Holly Ganz, CSO AnimalBiome

• Defining the core healthy microbiome provides an important frame of reference that is useful for feed and supplement formulators as well as veterinary medicine

• Diet is a major factor influencing the composition of bacteria in the gut microbiome, and nutrition studies show that members of the core microbiome in healthy dogs and cats respond in a predictable manner to dietary changes

• Microbiome testing is useful as a research tool for designing new products that support and promote a healthy gut microbiome

Matt Koci, Professor North Carolina State University

• Microbiome, metabolomic, and RNAseq data is great for giving a broad survey of what is going on in the gut at a particular time

• These approaches rarely point to one clear pathway driving host health

• The goal is using the different omics tools to identify core pathways, ranking them for functional characterization

Vadim Bellinson, AgBiome

• Diverse and characterized microbial library

• Specific and relevant bioassays

• Bioinformatics tools

Chris Belnap, CEO Resilient Biotics

• Methods and laboratory models for understanding microbiome community function

• Key data that can help drive in vitro model development and speed product discovery & validation

• Are these models and predictive methods reliable? Can we accurately re-create microbiome interactions in the lab? 

Marcos Rostagno, Director, Technical & Regulatory Services Phytobiotics North America LLC; Padmakumar Pillai, Senior Advisor, R&D Scientific & Regulatory Affairs Cargill

• How do you choose your path?

• What are the pros and cons of each of the regulatory approaches (GRAS, Self GRAS, New Ingredient, FDA)

• Discussion around claims, and what data is required to support this

• What are the challenges in working with the FDA?

• Can feeds be re-positioned to therapeutics?

Peter Ferket, Director, Distinguished Professor of Poultry Science, Nutrition, and Biotechnology North Carolina State University

• This presentation will discuss how to cultivate gut health by understanding the fundamentals of ecology and enteric development, particularly during the early growth phase, including 1) the ecological environment, 2) nutrient substrate balance and 3) symbiotic microflora stability

• Evidence will be presented that perinatal nutritional manipulation by in ovo feeding not only enhances early enteric development, but also the development of pioneer colonizers that are important for a sustained and stable microbiome

• Management and dietary treatments during the neonatal period will be presented that further benefits the development of the gut microbiome and gut health and resist the proliferation of enteric pathogens

Xandra Smith, Research Manager Arm and Hammer Animal Feed and Food Production

• The early colonizing bacteria affect succession of the gut microbiota and impact subsequent performance

• Probiotics fed to young livestock could impact microbial succession and improve health parameters

• Studies were performed to determine the microbial succession along the gastrointestinal tract of chicks, poults, weanling pigs and calves fed Bacillus-based probiotics