Hummingbird AI is now live! Sign up here.
Hummingbird AI is now live! Sign up here.
How a $46B Consumer Health Company used Forager AI to decode complex TCM formulations and uncover new product opportunities
–Customer, Customer Title
Traditional medicine formulations often contain hundreds or thousands of compounds. While many ingredients have known health benefits, identifying the specific molecules responsible—and the biological pathways behind them—can take months of scientific analysis.
This work typically requires interpreting complex mass spectrometry data, reviewing scientific literature, and manually mapping molecules to biological pathways. For complex natural ingredients, generating meaningful molecular insight can take six months or longer.
At the same time, the customer was looking to expand its innovation pipeline and strengthen scientific claims around natural health ingredients. To move faster in competitive markets, the company needed a way to generate deep molecular insight quickly while uncovering new product opportunities.
The company partnered with Brightseed to explore whether Forager AI could accelerate scientific discovery while providing deeper molecular insight into complex natural ingredients. Powered by Brightseed’s proprietary bioactive dataset, Forager maps molecules to biological pathways and health outcomes— delivering insight in weeks rather than months. This combination of speed and biological insight aligned with the customer’s innovation objectives.
Scientific insight generated in 8 weeks instead of 6+ months
Platform successfully identified immune-related benefits already known to Haleon
Complex natural mixtures decoded rapidly
Additional health benefits and molecular drivers uncovered
To analyze the biological potential of their traditional Chinese medicine samples, Haleon partnered with Brightseed to evaluate the material using metabolomics-based molecular profiling and Forager AI.
Haleon provided physical samples but intentionally withheld known health benefits associated with them. The goal was to determine whether the platform could independently identify the biological activity of the material.
Brightseed first generated molecular data from the samples through metabolomics analysis. That data was then analyzed by Forager AI, which evaluated thousands of compounds and mapped them against biological pathways and health outcomes.
Within eight weeks, the platform generated detailed predictions describing the biological effects associated with the samples.
The customer is a global consumer health company focused on accelerating innovation across major health categories including weight management, immune health, pain relief, and nutritional supplements.
The results exceeded the client’s expectations.
Forager AI successfully identified the same biological benefits that the customer already knew the traditional medicine delivered—including effects related to inflammation reduction, immune regulation, and pathogen defense.
This confirmed that the platform could accurately capture known biological insights from complex natural ingredients.
But the platform went further.
Forager also identified the specific molecules responsible for those effects, providing the customer with a deeper mechanistic understanding of how the ingredients worked at a molecular level.
Even more importantly, the system identified additional potential health benefits beyond those already known, revealing new areas of product opportunity.
What historically required months of manual analysis was achieved in just eight weeks, accelerating the company’s research timeline by approximately 70%.
The insights generated through Forager are now helping the customer explore opportunities to:
Brightseed’s proprietary bioactive intelligence helps teams find and evaluate opportunities that are difficult to surface through public data, generic AI, suppliers, or manual research alone.
