Principal Investigators for Small Business: DiscoveryBioMed, Inc. (DBM) and Monell Chemical Senses Center
Project Summary Abstract
Bitter taste in foods and medicines presents a barrier to overcoming global public health challenges: food
insecurity, poor nutritional health, and poor compliance with medication use, particularly among children and
the elderly. Sugar and salt, the mainstays to address these challenges, further erode nutritional health, and
current alternatives have adverse taste attributes of their own. We propose to develop a reliable, human taste-
cell screening platform to find bitter blockers of commercial interest to the food, flavor, and pharmaceutical
industries, with the aim to improve the taste and acceptance of nutritious and sustainable foods and medicines.
This Phase 1 STTR proposal has the following goals: (a) to establish immortal human taste-bud-derived
epithelial cell cultures and lines (i.e., hTBEC platforms) from donors with bitter-sensitive genotypes and (b) to
design, optimize, and implement hTBEC-based bioassays of bitter taste receptor function and other key end
points to produce readout data for high-throughput screening (HTS). This proposed research is the initial step
toward our ultimate goal of executing a full HTS-based campaign to discover and validate bitter taste receptor
antagonists from phytochemicals, phytochemical derivatives, and botanical extracts and extract fractions. This
commercial-academic collaboration between DiscoveryBioMed, Inc. and Monell Chemical Senses Center
brings together expertise in (a) culture of human taste cells, (b) the creation of immortalized cell lines, (c) HTS,
and (c) genetics and human sensory analysis. The hypothesis is that hTBEC-platform-based bioassays will
provide a more relevant and robust way to identify new bitter antagonists, given the imperfect current methods
of overexpressing known taste receptors in heterologous cells. The discovery of bitter taste receptor
antagonists that alone or blended will block bitter taste can improve healthy eating by reducing reliance on salt
and sugar and can improve compliance by patients taking medicines. Thus, new bitter blockers will improve
human health.
PHS 398/2590 (Rev. 09/04, re-issued 4/2006) Page Continuation Format Page
