Choosing the Right Questions for Collaborative Science

Many of the scientific questions facing food and nutrition science today do not sit neatly within one organisation. They span disciplines, require access to diverse expertise and evidence, and move faster than any single research programme can track alone. Industry scientists often have strong internal capability, but even well-resourced teams can benefit from broader scientific perspectives, independent expertise, and methodologies developed elsewhere.

This is the premise behind ILSI Europe’s pre-competitive model: bringing together scientists from industry, academia and the public sector to work on shared scientific questions. Collaboration delivers value when it is applied to well-defined questions, with the right expertise in the room, transparency about funding and affiliations, and scientific integrity throughout. The four activities below, two completed and two just getting under way, illustrate what that looks like in practice.

From individual evidence to collective understanding: wom
en’s health

Women’s health outcomes are shaped by interactions between the microbiome, immune system, metabolism and hormonal changes across the life course. Yet much of microbiome and nutrition research has been designed around sex-neutral assumptions, with limited attention to hormonal cyclicity and life-stage transitions (1). Few individual organisations hold the full picture of prebiotic evidence and mechanisms across all these stages.

In 2025, the ILSI Europe Prebiotics Task Force (2) set up an Expert Group to address this gap directly: assessing current evidence on prebiotic interventions and health outcomes in women, examining underlying mechanisms including microbial composition, metabolites, barrier function, immune regulation and estrogen metabolism, and identifying research gaps to support more inclusive, hormone-informed studies in future.

A manuscript arising from this work has now been submitted for peer review. It sets out a life-course framework describing how candidate prebiotics, including inulin-type fructans, oligofructose, fructo-oligosaccharides, galacto-oligosaccharides and resistant starch, may modulate the interactions between the microbiome, immune system and endocrine signalling from puberty through reproductive years, pregnancy, menopause and ageing. The manuscript points to potential benefits across several of these stages, including bone health during puberty, obesity and type 2 diabetes, vaginal microbial resilience, immune tolerance during pregnancy, and immunometabolic health during menopause, while noting that future research should be longitudinal, hormone-informed and sex-stratified.

Extending the model: metabolic health and the gut-brain axis

The same Task Force applied a related approach to a different question: how GLP-1 receptor agonists and prebiotic strategies might influence appetite regulation, metabolic health, cognition and mental well-being through the gut-brain axis. Metabolic, cognitive and mental health are increasingly understood as connected through shared signalling pathways, which makes this a question that benefits from expertise across several fields at once.

In February 2026, the Prebiotics Task Force convened an expert workshop on this topic, bringing together 70 high-level participants to review emerging evidence, discuss clinical implications and identify priority research questions for the field. The proceedings are currently being prepared for publication.

Early signals, structured evaluation: HMOs and infant neurodevelopment

Not every collaborative activity starts from an established evidence base. Growing evidence points to a role for the gut microbiota in shaping neurocognitive development, behaviour and mental health through the microbiome-gut-brain axis, and early-life nutrition may influence how the microbiota develops during key developmental windows.

Under ILSI Europe’s Early Nutrition & Long-Term Health Task Force (3), a new activity is being set up to conduct a systematic review of the evidence linking human milk oligosaccharides to infant microbiota development and cognitive outcomes. Rather than starting with assumptions, the review is designed to first map what the evidence does and does not yet support, and to identify the methodological gaps that should guide future research.

Building shared tools: contaminant management for food business operators

ILSI Europe activities sometimes also address more applied, practical gaps. Food business operators currently lack standardised protocols for managing contaminants across their ingredient supply chains, and approaches vary widely across the sector. The Food Contaminants Task Force (4) has launched a new activity in August 2026 to develop harmonised, risk-based guidance for ingredient contaminant management systems. The work will combine literature review with expert input to produce both general system-level advice and ingredient-specific recommendations, intended for publication as a guidance document alongside an open-access, peer-reviewed paper.

Which questions are worth solving together?

These four activities span different stages, from a submitted manuscript to an Expert Group still being formed, and different types of questions, from mechanistic evidence synthesis to practical guidance for industry. What they share is a starting point: a scientific question too broad, too fragmented or too resource-intensive for any one organisation to resolve on its own.

For industry scientists, the practical question is which scientific questions are best addressed collectively, and under what conditions. ILSI Europe’s newly released Scientific Portfolio 2027 (5) sets out the current Task Force activities and offers a way for food scientists to explore where their own scientific questions or research might connect with this work. Wherever that connection lies, the same principle holds: shared scientific questions tend to move further when more than one perspective is brought to bear on them.

References and notes

1. Vriend EMC, Galenkamp H, Herrema H, Nieuwdorp M, Van Den Born BJH, Verhaar BJH. Machine learning analysis of sex and menopausal differences in the gut microbiome in the HELIUS study. NPJ Biofilms Microbiomes. 2024;10(1):152. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41522-024-00628-z
2. ILSI Europe Prebiotics Task Force, https://ilsi.eu/scientific-activities/nutrition/prebiotics/
3. ILSI Europe Early Nutrition & Long-Term Health Task Force, https://ilsi.eu/scientific-activities/nutrition/early-nutrition-and-long-term-health/
4. ILSI Europe Food Contaminants Task Force, https://ilsi.eu/scientific-activities/food-safety/food-contaminants/
5. ILSI Europe Scientific Portfolio 2027, https://ilsi.eu/activity-document/