AQABELA - Functional Food Ingredients for Health Protection

We started Aqabela during the Covid crisis after witnessing the social consequences of a public health strategy that prioritized patient treatment over the understanding that prevention is the best medicine. Today, the emerging focus is on 'Healthspan' — a concept that emphasizes the importance of nutrition and healthspan by promoting ways to help people maintain their health for longer periods. Investors have identified this as potentially the largest total addressable market in history. In the USA alone, one estimate places the market at a staggering $38 trillion for every additional year of healthy living, highlighting the significance of incorporating functional ingredients in food for optimal health protection (Scott et al., Nature Aging (2021) 1: 616-623).

We asked ourselves, "What could work as another layer of health protection that could significantly impact healthspan?" We believed that nutrition was the key. Much of the activity in this area is currently focused on the pharmaceutical space. The primary concern here is safety—every drug has toxicity, and some of the proposed protocols involve using multiple pharmaceutical products, which amplifies these safety issues. However, we have discovered functional ingredients in food that can provide better results than pharmaceutical products without the associated safety concerns.