The company’s flagship product is branded as Renadyl, and is based on proprietary probiotic strains developed by Natarajan Ranganathan, PhD.
The organisms feed preferentially on waste products such as urea, creatinine and uric acid that are not being eliminated by underperforming, diseased kidneys. As these become more concentrated in the blood, some leak into the gut, where the strains in the Renadyl supplement feed upon them, lowering the concentration in the gut. Diffusion then drives increasing amounts of the waste products into the gut, lowering blood concentrations.
“The concept is when the kidney fails the toxins increase in the blood, and your blood flows all over your body, but the largest amount of blood flow is in your bowel,” Raganathan said.
Harnessing bowel’s absorption capacity in reverse
The bowel’s surface area is equivalent to that of a tennis court, he said. Generally one speaks of substances being absorbed from the bowel into the bloodstream. Raganathan’s innovation was to use that vast absorption capacity in reverse to help soak up these toxins.
Raganathan’s first stab, which he started on more than two decades ago on an NIS grant, was to genetically modify probiotic organisms for this task but that approach ran into both technical and regulatory difficulties.
“We turned around and screened various naturally occurring microbes and found some that can use these toxins,” Raganathan said. “These are naturally occurring microbes and we found out that some of these microbes had a greater capacity to utilize the uremic toxins if you grow them under proprietary conditions, or what we call uremic conditions.”