Cytophage Technologies has been chosen as the winner of this year’s Nutreco Feed Tech Challenge. Now in its second year, the Nutreco Feed Tech Challenge is designed to kick-start breakthrough innovation in animal nutrition. Cytophage’s solution to develop a synthetic cocktail of bacteriophage to prevent and treat infections like campylobacter, salmonella and E. coli bacterial infections in chickens will now receive a validation trial in one of Nutreco’s research farms.
Cytophage Technologies wins the Nutreco Feed Tech Challenge 2018
"Winning the Feed Tech Challenge means that we’ll be able to hit the world’s stage. As a start-up that is the best thing that we can hope for."
Promising solutions
Earlier this week, following a two-day event at Nutreco’s headquarters in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, an international jury chose the three finalists. In addition to Cytophage Technologies, the others in the top three were Rex Animal Health and Folium Science.
Folium Science has developed biome modulators that remove unwanted bacteria without the use of antibiotics, while supporting desirable colonies. Rex Animal Health is working to create the world’s largest datasets of animal genomics data mapped to health, production, feed and medicine interaction.
Commenting on the three finalists, Nutreco Chief Innovation Officer Viggo Halseth says, “The solutions proposed by this year’s finalists demonstrate the drive of Nutreco to play its part in resolving the issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).”
This year’s Feed Tech Challenge received a total of 52 solutions from around the world, the majority coming from start-ups. The Feed Tech Challenge is set up to ensure that every contestant gets valuable support. In the first round, all 52 solutions were given feedback from industry experts and scientists, with a total of 530 examples of feedback and commentary, and 700 active visitors on the open innovation platform.
Nutreco NuFrontiers
Today’s F&A Next also saw the official launch of Nutreco NuFrontiers, the company’s strategic innovation and investment division.
Presenting the division at F&A Next, Viggo Halseth commented, “At NuFrontiers, we look for joint ventures and partnerships to create ‘moonshot’ projects that address major bottlenecks in the feed and food value chain. We also invest in starts-ups and scale-ups in new technologies, ingredients and formulations. Working together with these types of companies is still relatively new territory for us. This is one of the reasons why we started the Feed Tech Challenge. We want to get in touch with entrepreneurs and learn how we can cooperate with them more effectively.”
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