SABPA’s self-GRAS affirmation for sceletium
The Southern African Botanical Products Association (SABPA) announced that South African botanical Mesembryanthemum tortuosum (Sceletium tortuosum, also known as kanna) has achieved self-affirmed GRAS status in the United States for raw material use.
The initiative is intended to support international market access, strengthen supply chain stability, and expand commercial opportunities for South African growers and ingredient suppliers while maintaining quality and regulatory credibility.
“SABPA believes this milestone will strengthen confidence among U.S buyers seeking reliable, quality-assured sources of sceletium,” said SABPA co-founder and board member Dr. Thomas Brendler, who led the effort to build the self-GRAS dossier.
Sceletium is attracting interest for mood, stress, anxiety, and cognitive-support applications.
Building on the successful affirmation of raw material, SABPA is now turning its attention to securing a similar self-GRAS affirmation for a generic sceletium extract.
“Value adding is happening in the United States and not in South Africa for the most part, and so the raw material needed to be legitimized, but the generic extract dossier is needed when the membership starts extracting so that they can sell a value-added product into the international marketplace,” Brendler noted.
Why it matters: The move highlights growing industry interest in African-origin botanicals as brands search for new, clinically supported ingredients.
Buck Institute and Oracle partner to detect age-related decline years before symptoms
A new collaboration between the Buck Institute for Research on Aging will use Oracle Health’s Oracle Life Sciences Data Intelligence platform will leverage real-world health data and analytics to identify biomarkers of age-related decline and support the development of an early-warning vitality score.
The research aims to identify biomarkers that may indicate fragility or chronic disease years before symptoms emerge.
The research also plans to create a statistically validated “Intrinsic Capacity Score” by analyzing longitudinal health records to detect early markers of age-related decline. Achieving FDA qualification for this vitality score would establish an officially recognized benchmark to accelerate clinical trials and early interventions for healthy aging.
The work forms part of THRIVE (Transforming Health: Reclaiming Intrinsic Vitality for Everyone), a Stanford-led consortium within the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s (ARPA-H) PROSPR program, which also includes the Buck Institute. The coalition was awarded up to $34.5 million by ARPA-H to develop a score designed to forecast major health outcomes up to 20 years in advance.
Developing an FDA-recognized vitality metric from millions of real-world health records requires isolating early-warning signals from the background noise. The team plans to use automated feature selection to strip away irrelevant variables and pinpoint the precise indicators mapping to the five intrinsic capacity domains: cognition, locomotion, sensory, vitality and psychology.
Why it matters: Healthy longevity remains the industry’s biggest long-term growth opportunity. Predictive aging biomarkers could create entirely new categories of nutrition interventions focused on delaying functional decline rather than treating symptoms.
eimele leverages KOLs to grow reach across APAC, eyes expansion in US and Europe
Australian plant-based nutrition brand eimele recently launched a new app to enhance collaboration with content creators, as part of its ambition to expand its footprint across Asia-Pacific as well as Europe and the US.
The eimele 2.0 initiative is not just an upgrade of products, but rather building a closed-loop brand management ecosystem, encompassing R&D, production, sales, and service, says Frank He, founder and CEO of Access Corporate Group, the China-based parent and brand management company of eimele.
“The core of eimele 2.0 is to integrate overseas creators and influencers who share plant-based nutrition, health, and lifestyle information into our brand’s co-creation ecosystem. Therefore, it is a crucial step in popularizing eimele’s plant-based nutrition,” He told NutraIngredients.
Why it matters: Creator-driven commerce is becoming a primary growth channel, with supplement brands increasingly view influencers and expert creators as core components of customer acquisition rather than simply marketing partners.
