At our recent Growth Asia Summit 2026, Lucas Chang, R&D Manager (Human Microbiome) at TCI, emphasized that advanced probiotic delivery must evolve from resolving a logistics issue to addressing biological challenges.
“For a long time, probiotic delivery had a very clear engineering logic — protect the microbe from harsh conditions, keep it viable through transit, and release it into the intestine. Success was often defined by one event: survival and arrival,” Chang said.
“But arrival is only the beginning. What happens next depends on context, ecosystem, and function. The real advance in gut-axis science (gut-brain, gut-liver, gut-skin, gut-muscle) is not drawing another arrow; it is being able to trace biology.”
This means that the “evidence chain” — microbiome function, bioactive compounds being made or transformed, host response to change, and measurable impact at a distant site — must be traceable.
“If these steps cannot be traced, even if there is an interesting correlation, there may not be a clear probiotic mechanism. And this matters enormously when we talk about healthy aging because aging changes how our body handles pressure or biological challenges.”
Tackling aging pressure points
According to Chang, biology does not decline at one constant speed, with different pressure points emerging across the lifespan.
He cited a longitudinal multi-omics study that looked across transcripts, proteins, metabolites, lipids, cytokines, and different microbiomes, and found that the changes were not linear.
There were two checkpoints where the body faces major disruption, with the first one happening around the 40s. The researchers saw changes involving lipid metabolism, alcohol metabolism, and cardiovascular health in general, noting that the metabolism may not have simply “slowed down” but hints that the way the body handles pressure may be shifting.
The second transition happens around the age of 60. This time, the changes are more on immune regulation, carbohydrate metabolism, oxidative-stress and related pathways.
“Later in life, two people with the same chronological age can follow very different functional trajectories. One may be booking flights for travel, and the other one may be booking doctor’s appointments,” Chang explained.
“Healthy aging is not simply ‘how do we avoid this transition?’ because that is quite impossible. We eat too much sometimes, have bad sleep, get stressed, and life continues to happen. It is about how well one’s body can handle the heat, and how well we can recover from it before the next biological challenge arrives. Resilience lies in the space between two challenges.”He added that once the gut is viewed from this perspective, the gut-axis story becomes “much bigger” than digestion, extending to local microbial function, biological signals, distant phenotype and measurable impact.
Two stresses, one probiotic
Two common aging stresses are fat accumulation, a chronic metabolic pressure that can build up over months or years; and alcohol, an acute challenge on the body that can take place within hours.
To target these challenges with a single probiotic, TCI developed TCR711 (Bacillus coagulans TCI711), a patented, spore-forming probiotic strain.
In a randomized, placebo-controlled study involving 57 adults with non-alcohol fatty liver disease (NAFLD), Controlled Attenuation Parameter (CAP) on FibroScan was used to measure hepatic steatosis (fat accumulation in the liver).
The results showed that liver-fat outcome in the TCR711 intervention group improved by 8.7% versus placebo. Notably, the gut ecology also shifted, suggesting that the probiotic did not work on the liver alone.
“Large human microbiome studies have linked fatty liver to shifts in microbial metabolic capacity, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). The liver signal did not appear in isolation; the ecosystem moved with it,” Chang said.
“It is building a team in our gut, especially those that are SCFA producers, including bifidobacteria, so that they send signals from gut to liver and improve lipid metabolism.”
In another study, participants were asked to supplement TCR711 for one week, and subsequently performed a whiskey shot challenge. Changes were observed over a two-hour period.
It was found that the intervention group exhibited a faster alcohol-clearance signal, with alcohol dehydrogenase- and aldehyde dehydrogenase-related capabilities detected in the strain.
Liquid probiotic chocolate
During his presentation, Chang reiterated that engineering a functional probiotic is not only about designing the delivery but also the outcome.
“We want a strain that not just arrives alive, but one that does a specific job after arrival. And this changes the order of product design.
“Instead of asking ‘which strain should I add?’, start with the health outcome and functions you want to change. Trace the biology backwards, define the microbial job, then build the probiotic strain, function and delivery around it. Delivery gets the cell to the gut, and function gives it a reason to be there.”
Chang also showcased the application of TCI’s probiotic in liquid chocolate format, which he claimed not only helps with survival, but also builds consumers’ daily habits.
Beyond the flavor factor, this format offers a low free-water, lipid-rich phase, and reduced exposure to moisture and oxygen, making it a strain-compatible environment.
“It is designed for everyday moments. You can eat it as a snack or put it in your breakfast, cookies, bread, or even on top of your ice cream.
“I’m not saying that chocolate is naturally good for every probiotic. This is matrix engineering. Once we built this matrix, we realized that maybe advanced probiotic delivery should not begin by asking ‘how do we force the probiotic into a supplement format?’. Sometimes the answer is already sitting in our daily life.”