Nutrition designed for the rations mills already make

The problem we are working on

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been the most extensive avian-influenza event in modern U.S. poultry production. Federal reporting documents outbreak activity across all fifty states, with cumulative losses exceeding 179 million birds since February 2022 and continuing commercial detections through 2026.

The existing control framework rests on four pillars: farm biosecurity, surveillance and rapid outbreak response, depopulation of affected and exposed flocks, and continuing development of vaccination and therapeutic options. Each is essential. Considered together, however, they are directed principally at preventing viral introduction, detecting infection, containing transmission, or eliminating affected flocks after detection.

Two constraints are documented in the federal record. USDA's Agricultural Research Service has stated that vaccination for HPAI is not currently used in U.S. commercial poultry because of trade implications. Federal regulation prohibits extra-label use of adamantanes and neuraminidase inhibitors in chickens, turkeys, and ducks, and USDA APHIS states that there is no treatment for HPAI. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has described the policy position directly: "There is no silver bullet to eradicating avian flu."

The approach under development

Phytogenic feed additives are already well established in poultry nutrition, and commercial feed systems routinely incorporate plant-derived functional ingredients. We apply that established delivery platform to a disease-resilience research objective rather than to the production-performance objectives around which most commercial phytogenic products are positioned.

Four components were selected on the basis of published peer-reviewed literature describing antiviral, immunomodulatory, antioxidant, or host-defense properties, together with their suitability for feed delivery and the feasibility of sourcing and standardizing them at commercial scale. Full citations are on the science page.

Citations and the boundary between published findings and this untested formulation are on the science page. The four components are designed as a system. Whether the combined formulation produces the intended effects remains an open question.

Why feed-based delivery

Commercial poultry consume formulated feed daily. A properly developed additive can therefore be administered flock-wide through infrastructure that already exists, without individual bird handling and without farm-level infrastructure change. That has three consequences for how we work:

• Operational practicality. The intervention enters through an established manufacturing and delivery channel rather than requiring a new farm-level administration system.
• Technical difficulty concentrated in formulation. Feed manufacturing subjects bioactive compounds to grinding, mixing, pelleting, moisture, heat, and storage. Preserving bioactivity through those conditions, at inclusion rates that do not degrade palatability or feed quality, is the central engineering problem.
• Transferable methods. The analytical marker methods, stability data, and quality specifications this work generates are applicable to other feed-delivered disease-resilience products, not only to this formulation.

What we are building

This is not an ingredient-discovery project. The work is the translational sequence that determines whether published ingredient-level evidence can become a product a mill can run:

Work stream	Content
Formulation	Ingredient specifications, candidate inclusion ranges, carrier optimization, feed-matrix compatibility, palatability and tolerance.
Analytical	Marker-compound methods, bioactive retention through processing and storage, stability programs, mixing uniformity.
Validation	Safety and tolerance endpoints, immune- and antioxidant-response endpoints, and disease-relevant evaluation conducted only in appropriately qualified facilities.
Regulatory	Ingredient-status review, FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine requirements, AAFCO definitions and state feed-control provisions, and a lawful claim set supported by generated data.
Manufacturing & quality	Supplier qualification, certificates of analysis, incoming-lot specifications, pilot batches, batch-release controls, quality assurance.

Current stage, completed work, and what has deliberately not yet been established are on the progress page and updated as milestones are reached.

Who we want to hear from

We draw on specialized U.S. capability at each stage: analytical laboratories, university poultry-research units and contract research organizations, regulatory and quality professionals, ingredient suppliers, contract manufacturers, feed mills, and commercial poultry producers. If that is you, write — including at stages earlier than field evaluation. See Work with us.