Medicinal Gardens S.L.

Medicinal Gardens SL, known commercially as Baïa Food, is an Innovative SME with a strong R&D investment. The company has a DTC business line with a market place (www.baiafood.com) and offers organic superfoods, proprietary plant-based powder blends and is developing with an industry partner ready-to-drink organic plant-based protein beverages. The R&D line of the company focuses on the capacity of a West African berry (Synsepalum dulcificum) to modulate flavors and modify taste perception in humans. The active glycoprotein called miraculin is a homodimer of 44KDa which binds selectively to the human sweet taste receptors and activate them at a low pH, due to a change in conformation. The company is presently in the process of authorization of Miractin®, a proprietary standardized extract (>1.5% miraculin) which has proved the safety in a battery of 5 in vitro (mutagenicity & micronucleus) and in vivo studies (micronucleus, acute and sub-chronic toxicity) and the Novel Food dossier was submitted to the European Food Safety Authority at the end of 2018. We expect to be granted the 5-year exclusive market authorization by the end of 2020. Currently, the R&D department is composed of 3 pre-docs, conducting their Ph.D. in different areas related to the novel food: allergenicity and immunogenicity, extraction and purification and cell activity of polyphenolic-rich the extracts. Apart from that, we have two students performing their master’s thesis.