Abolis Biotechnologies has launched MINE, a microbial-intelligence platform designed to move ingredient and nutrition developers from trial and error towards smarter experimental design, helping teams decide which microorganisms, parameters and precursors are actually worth testing.

Paris-based Abolis announced the launch on 30 September. MINE, short for Microbial INtelligence Explorer, is built on a deep understanding of metabolic networks and integrates multi-omics data to show what is happening in microbial ecosystems, interpret the biology, design optimisation cycles and guide scale-up. For food and nutrition businesses exploring biotics, fermentation-derived ingredients and bio-based alternatives, the pitch is faster optimisation with fewer blind alleys.

Data is not the same as direction

Microbial systems hold significant potential for companies seeking new approaches to product performance, supply-chain resilience and more sustainable production. The bottleneck, Abolis argues, is rarely a shortage of biological data. Generating it is not the same as knowing how to use it.

For many manufacturers and R&D teams, the harder question is which biological mechanisms and parameters matter at the metabolic level, and which development routes warrant further investigation. MINE is positioned as a way of answering that before significant lab time and budget are committed.

What the platform does

MINE brings together genomic exploration, multi-omics analysis and experimental interpretation. In practice, that means helping teams to:

• examine how individual strains contribute to producing molecules of interest;
• understand interactions within more complex microbial systems;
  identify levers for process optimisation; and
• link those findings to technical and industrial constraints, so partners can prioritise experiments, identify validation needs and focus resources on the most credible development routes.

Insight without the specialist bottleneck

A notable part of the proposition is accessibility. Abolis says MINE makes microbial data more approachable for R&D and open-innovation teams without requiring every decision-maker to be an omics or bioinformatics specialist. Abolis’ multidisciplinary scientific team supports partners in interpreting the evidence against their own product objectives and technical requirements.

The platform supports work across pharma and healthcare, cosmetics and personal care, and food, nutrition and agriculture, including the development of ingredients, biotics, fermentation-derived products and bio-based alternatives.

From hypothesis to scale-up

MINE extends Abolis’ ideation-to-scale model by connecting microbial intelligence with its capabilities in strain engineering, enzyme modelling, fermentation, bioprocess development and scale-up support. The practical upshot is that partners can assess biological potential and industrial feasibility within the same development programme, rather than discovering process constraints late in the day.

The platform’s roots lie in Microbiome Studio, an ML-enabled analytical platform born out of the Metapath project, an industrial programme supported by the French government. Initially created for Abolis’ own microbial-biotechnology programmes, it was refined through industrial collaborations before being developed into MINE for external R&D and open-innovation teams.

Sylvia Julien, general manager of Abolis’ MINE Business Unit, said: “The challenge in microbial biotechnologies lies in the difficulty of integrating the various pieces of information and, therefore, to know which signals matter and which hypotheses deserve further testing for product development. MINE gives teams a clearer way to navigate that complexity, helping them focus experimental work on the questions most likely to move a programme forward.”

Cyrille Pauthenier, co-founder and CEO of Abolis, said: “MINE software release marks the point at which more than a decade of microbial-biotechnology, data and industrial experience of Abolis becomes a platform to boost partners’ research and our own research. It strengthens Abolis’ ability to support decisions before, during and beyond experimentation, connecting biological evidence with the realities of validation, process development and scale-up. For our partners, that means a clearer route from microbial potential to an industrially relevant programme.”

Founded in 2014, Abolis combines expertise across industrial biotechnology, microbiology, microbial fermentation, metabolism, robotics and IP strategy.

The appeal of MINE lies in decision support, narrowing the field of strains, parameters and precursors before experiments begin, and keeping scale-up realities in view from the outset. Companies without in-house omics expertise may find that most compelling.