Nutritional Outlook's 2024 Best of the Industry Awards, Industry Supplier: Aker BioMarine

When it comes to krill oil, Aker BioMarine (Oslo, Norway) is the authority. The company is currently responsible for 70% of Antarctic krill catch¹ and transforms that into 90% of the crude krill oil market for human nutrition, according to Aker BioMarine’s CEO of human health ingredients, Simon Seward. Aker BioMarine dominates the market for human nutrition because most of its competition harvests krill for aquaculture. While Aker BioMarine also supplies aquaculture, the company has been built on its belief that krill, as the largest biomass on the planet, has enormous value for health and nutrition.

“It all started with this, let’s call it: ‘investment hypothesis.’ There’s nothing more of on the planet than krill. There’s krill in all the oceans, and the ocean covers 70% of the planet’s surface. So, there’s basically krill everywhere, just that it’s only in Antarctica that they come together in concentration, where you can catch it in a commercial way,” says Matts Johansen, CEO of Aker BioMarine. “Krill sits in the bottom of the food chain, and we learn in biology at school that all important nutrients accumulate [at the bottom of the food chain and work their way] up through that food chain. So, you can imagine that through the size of the biomass, the fact that it’s everywhere and where it sits in the food chain, that through millions of years of evolution krill and the nutrients in krill have become important for all life on the planet.”

Matts Johansen, CEO of Aker BioMarine. Image courtesy of Aker BioMarine.

It’s important to note that our current understanding and knowledge of krill oil and its benefits are rather young. Much of this knowledge is the result of Aker BioMarine’s investment in the ingredient. “If we look back to 2006, when all of this really started for Aker BioMarine, very little was understood about krill at that time,” says Seward. “It has been a voyage of discovery during that time where we’ve invested hard in clinical studies and really the science behind krill and really evolved the krill category into the omega-3 space. Also within the DNA of Aker BioMarine is innovation. We challenge ourselves on a day-to-day basis, really. How do we understand the most about crude [krill] oil and how can we turn that into some commercial benefits and advantage and deliver really compelling human nutrition solutions.”

Innovation: From Sea to Shelf

It all starts in the ocean, and Aker BioMarine has been committed from the start to engage in responsible and sustainable harvesting practices by partnering with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who provided technical and strategic advice on how Aker BioMarine can set high standards for sustainability. As a result, Aker BioMarine adopted continuous trawling technology it refers to as Eco-Harvesting that dramatically reduces its risk of bycatch.

Simon Seward, CEO of human health ingredients. Image courtesy of Aker BioMarine.

“There’s more than enough krill, but there’s other species in Antarctica that are vulnerable. You must make sure you don’t have bycatch,” explains Johansen. “Where you get bycatch is on the surface. Birds, seals, [and other vulnerable species can] get tangled up trying to eat the catch. When you have continuous trawling, meaning that you just get the krill into the trawl and then pump it straight [into the boat], you don’t have that kind of concentration of raw materials [on the water’s surface] that animals can eat from [because] you never take it to the surface where animals are. Through that we have 0.01% bycatch, unheard of in any [other] fisheries.”

Aker BioMarine is also committed to data collection in the Antarctic Ocean to help with conservation efforts. The company founded the Antarctic Wildlife Research Fund (AWRF) and has contributed $2 million over the years, with additional contributions from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Green Peace, WWF, and Pew Charity Trusts. “Every year AWRF gives out two large grants to universities that will release government money so they can go to Antarctica and do ecosystem research,” says Johansen. “So far, we have funded 20 studies that tell us everything about how whale populations are functioning to how long penguins travel when they forage.”

Another valuable innovation Aker BioMarine is working on has the potential to dramatically increase sustainable fishing practices. Johansen refers to it as the feedback management system, and its goal is to set real-time quotas based on real-time data. “Over the last seven years we’ve been working on a drone technology to systematically gather data on drift and traffic,” says Johansen. “Now we have a big, well-functioning drone, working, collecting data, teaching a machine learning model that looks at everything from satellite pictures, weather, temperatures, currents to predict where the biomass is, and then the drone will teach the model.”

“And we have now even gotten CCAMLR [The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources], which is the regulatory body of Antarctic region, to commit that they will be the first to implement feedback management as soon as the technology is advanced enough,” he adds. “And I would say we are 70% there now. I mean, it’s not a perfect prediction, but you give this, let’s say 2-3 more years, you will be able to actually set quotas real time, which means that the quotas will be dynamic over the year and that will change for different regions, making sure you never take too much in any place and this will be like a role model for any fishery in the world. We are developing the technology and we’re making it available transparently to any other fishery that wants to copy what we do.”

Beyond harvesting, Aker BioMarine has invested heavily in advanced processing of krill oil that gets the most out of the ingredient, as well as finding innovative ways to leverage the company’s growing expertise in krill phospholipids for new product development. The backbone of the company’s line of krill oil, called Superba, is its patented Flexitech technology, which launched in 2016. Exclusive to Aker BioMarine, the technology up-concentrates the beneficial components of krill such as phospholipids and omega-3s while removing the salts, such as trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), which are responsible for unpleasant odor and flavor. This improves krill oil’s encapsulation properties without using any high temperature treatment such as molecular distillation, or solvents other than ethanol and water.

A more recent innovation from the company is Lysoveta, a lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC)-bound EPA and DHA, which has the potential to benefit brain and eye health. The ingredient was developed based on research that demonstrated LPC was a primary carrier molecule that transports DHA across the blood brain barrier.² This uptake mechanism can be broadly applied to other polyunsaturated fatty acids such as EPA. LPC is also present in the eyes and liver, says Aker BioMarine. Lysoveta is the subject of a pharmaceutical agreement and a licensing agreement, as well as a successful new dietary ingredient notification, which speaks to the potential commercial opportunities of the ingredient.

“[LPC] is a phospholipid that plays several important roles, but particularly in terms of brain health, healthy aging, cognitive health, which are here-to-stay categories that all nations and national governments health services are really interested in because we’re all living longer,” says Seward. “Maintaining healthy levels of LPC is really important to ensure optimal brain function and also to help mitigate neurological conditions. [Lysoveta] stems from the fact that DHA and EPA can’t be synthesized efficiently in the brain and needs to be transported across the blood brain barrier. And this is important when a protein that plays a role in many biological processes receive these fatty acids in the form of LPC, EPA, DHA. So, for Lysoveta, it’s backed by extensive pre-clinical science, planned clinicals will follow, and we’ve really taken a strategy around how we get an early position with this exciting ingredient.”

The body of scientific literature continues to grow on krill oil, and Aker BioMarine’s Superba krill oil in particular thanks to its open approach to working with researchers. Of course, the company had to make a large initial investment in substantiation.

“In the early years, we spent a lot because there was basically no knowledge. As you get more and more science, you get more and more incoming requests from universities, different types of other research organizations that want to do their own studies and we very early on established this kind of open innovation program,” says Johansen. “We kind of let it loose, which means that if your university wants to study our product, you get free product from us, you get knowledge transfer from everything that we have done, and you’re free to patent and file IP on stuff you find.”

This is an unusual approach that is typically advised against, says Johansen, but given that Aker BioMarine has 90% market share of krill oil, if something comes of the research, they will likely benefit from it somehow. So, while Johansen estimates that the company has invested over $100 million in pre-clinical and clinical trials, the amount of its investment is getting smaller and smaller over time because of this approach.

References

1. Takeaways from AP’s reporting on Antarctica’s burgeoning krill fishery. The Associated Press. October 13, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/antarctica-krill-fishing-whales-832c6bbce420274a2e5f13100e76076c (accessed 2024-11-29).
2. Krawiec, S. Aker BioMarine announces successful NDIN for its Lysoveta ingredient. Nutritional Outlook. https://www.nutritionaloutlook.com/view/aker-biomarine-announces-successful-ndin-for-its-lysoveta-ingredient(accessed 2024-11-29).