Winclove update on the annual ISAPP meeting

Winclove Probiotics is an active member of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP). Our participation allows us to keep abreast of  probiotics research and developments, put forward industry ideas, and serve as an active voice for our partners.  The latest annual ISAPP meeting was held in Denver, Colorado, USA on June 26-28, bringing biotics scientists together to share the latest developments, discuss topical issues, and form new connections and collaborations. The meeting included a range of interactive sessions to discuss and debate current scientific advances and questions of interest, alongside plenary lectures, late-breaking news, a poster session, and networking events.  

We were strongly involved every step of the way- from organising the event to presenting our research and participating in the ISAPP’s unique discussions groups. Since June 2022, Dr. Mariya Petrova, our Senior Scientific Educator has  served as Senior Industry Advisory Committee Representative to the ISAPP Board of Directors (link to some of the previous posts we have on this). In this role, Mariya has worked with the board  to create a unique programme and organise their activities, leading the conference’s industry-specific sections, webinars, and materials. Mariya also organised and chaired the industry plenary session, ‘Microbiome endpoints for clinical trials on biotics’,  focusing on the current, known and future directions for designing and interpreting clinical studies with microbiome endpoints.  

Active participation during the conference  

At this year’s ISAPP meeting we gave two presentations showcasing Winclove’s strong research endowers in the last years: Dr. Annemarieke van Opstal, one of our Clinical Research Experts, was specially selected to speak on “Beneficial effects of multispecies probiotics on mood and cognition in clinical studies.” The presentation focused on our latest collaboration with Reading University to better understand the beneficial effect of Ecologic® Barrier on mood and cognition; Mariya gave a short flash talk during the “Late breaking news session” on “Empowering women through their microbiome,” highlighting our latest collaboration with Dr. Rosanne Hertzberger on women’s health.  

 Take aways from the conference 

Finally, some additional take-aways from the conference:   

• Women’s health as a growing area of interest for all biotic substances;  
• As the body of gut-brain axis research grows, so does the potential of probiotics and prebiotics to benefit mental well-being;   
• The development of many “new” and different prebiotics with beneficial effects on human health;  
• Properly designed clinical studies are important in order to obtain biotics efficacy data; this includes focus on responder vs non-responder, careful selection of outcome measures, studying population characterization, capturing the microbiota data, etc.;  
• Preventing antibiotic use (especially in children) as important goal for biotic intervention;