When a group of professors in surgery and microbiology at the University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, originally began their research on probiotics, they probably didn't imagine that some day the fruits of their labor would appear in a granola bar marketed by one of America's food giants. It was the mid 1980s, and the professors were looking for a way to prevent infection in patients who had just undergone major surgery. The solution the researchers developed — a probiotic-rich enteral feed product — vastly exceeded their expectations. “They were even treating patients that didn't really have any hope and got very good results — [with] a substantial number of [these] people surviving,” explained Niklas Bjärum, vice president of marketing and sales for Probi, the biotechnology company that germinated from this research work.
When Probi was established in 1991, its founders wanted to use their research to launch a medicinal product, but the notoriously conservative and slow-...
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