Senomyx plays it cool

Flavours giant Firmenich and technology firm Senomyx have teamed up to develop novel flavour ingredients that will provide a cooling taste effect.

Under the three-year research, development, commercialisation and licence agreement, Senomyx will use its proprietary screening technologies to discover and develop novel compounds for Firmenich on an exclusive basis. Firmenich will in turn pay Senomyx research fees and payments upon the achievement of key milestones.

Firmenich chief executive Patrick Firmenich said cooling agents currently on the market were not up to the job: "They have deficiencies that restrict their utility, including weak cooling characteristics, bitter off-tastes, limited solubility and non-proprietary status."

Senomyx chief executive Kent Snyder said the new ingredients would have potential applications in confectionery, foods and beverages, oral care products and over-the-counter healthcare products.

Building on work by scientists who have successfully cloned human taste receptors for umami, sweet and bitter tastes, Senomyx uses proprietary biological screening techniques to evaluate millions of molecules to identify which substances bind to specific taste receptors.

The cool flavour program will use these techniques to screen compound libraries for samples that impart a cool taste effect, said Snyder.

"The assay has been validated through the identification of several compounds that provided a cool taste and appeared significantly more potent than menthol, WS-3, and other commonly used cooling agents in a threshold taste test for cooling," he said.