Danone North America, a CPG company specializing in plant-based foods, coffee creamers, and premium dairy products, is celebrating the tenth year of its Fellowship Grant Program, which supports scientific advances in research on probiotics, the gut microbiome, and yogurt.
 
This year’s 2021-2022 honorees were Elena Kozlova at the University of California Riverside, and Yannis Ntekas at Cornell University.
 
“Danone North America has an unwavering commitment to funding research that helps us better understand how to maintain and improve health. It is our mission to bring health through food to as many people as possible and our fellowship grants help us do just that,” said Miguel Freitas, PhD, vice president of health and scientific affairs at Danone North America. “We’re proud we have been able to fund valuable research and support the growth and expertise of new researchers over the past 10 years and look forward to continuing to do so. Both Elena Kozlova and Yannis Ntekas are poised to conduct successful studies and have impactful careers that will contribute to scientific discoveries and expand our understanding of probiotics, the gut microbiome, and human health.”
 
The Danone Fellowship Grant was established in 2010 to provide funding for novel studies of yogurt, probiotics, and the gut microbiome. Ntekas’s research will implement a novel RNA sequencing technology to study how probiotics colonize in the gut and how specific strains effect human health and wellbeing, while Kozlova will study how the maternal gut microbiome impacts the social behavior of offspring. Winners were chosen based on the quality of their proposals, faculty recommendations, and each of their studies’ value to human health and wellness.
 
“The Danone fellowship grant will provide the financial support to move forward on my academic journey and holistically explore a problem that matters,” says Ntekas. “Our research will leverage single-cell RNA sequencing technologies to effectively profile the gut microbiome with cell-phenotype resolution. I am particularly excited about this project because it will assist the field to address big unknowns like the dynamics of gut colonization by probiotics, and their interaction with the native microbiome.” Ntekas believes the findings will contribute to microbiome basic research and set the ground for the next generation of probiotics.
 
The health impact of yogurt, probiotics, and the gut microbiome has exceeded expectations and has been tied to brain, digestive, and immune function, leading to consumer interest in fermented foods, immune health, and gut health, Danone reports. This is especially true of consumer interest in the role that gut health plays in immune function, and in products that are tailored for specific health and wellness issues.
 
“Receiving the Danone North America Grant will allow me to study the effects of maternal administration of probiotics on offspring gut-brain axis and the relationship to socioemotional development in an environmental toxicant model,” Kozlova said. “The gut microbiome is emerging as an influential factor in host health; therefore, this grant provides excellent training opportunities in this exciting new field of research and will help guide scientific advancements. The interaction between gut microbiota and environmental toxicants is not well studied. This grant will allow us to examine the potential to promote healthy development of social neuropeptide and thyroid endocrine systems as well as how male and female offspring may be differentially affected. Lastly, we will better understand how maternal breast milk can provide a healthy microbiome.”
 
“The field of probiotics and the microbiome continues to evolve at great speed, and the emergence of new technologies and human models, such as the projects funded this year, will further accelerate our understanding of this field,” Freitas said. “The impact of the gut microbiome on human health is far-reaching, from benefits to our digestive and immune system, to playing a key role as the core of our mind-body connection, which is why investments to better understand this unique ecosystem are so important.”