How SGS Nutrasource works with clients to develop clinical research

Nutritional Outlook has recognized SGS Nutrasource as the 2025 winner of the Best of the Industry Service Provider.

In this interview, Joshua Baisley, SGS Nutrasource’s senior vice president of clinical operations, explains the company's collaborative process working with clients to reach their goals in developing clinical research, whether it's marketing, pilot studies, or competitive differentiation. He also discusses the services offered by GRAS Associates, LLC.

Transcript

Sebastian Krawiec: So how does Nutrasource work with clients to ensure that they get the most out of the research they're investing in? Like you said, there's a scale how much they want to invest, but at the end of the day, science isn't always predictable, but people want to get something out of their money.

Joshua Baisley: Yeah, so it really comes down to starting with the end in mind. We really want to understand what is it that you want to get out of this trial? As I said, some companies, it's pure marketing. The science isn't a priority. In other cases, it could be that they're doing a pilot study, and it really is just to find out, “Is there a signal? Am I on the right track? Should I be investing money into this type of indication?” Again, those types of studies don't need the same rigor, right? It's more about a fact-finding mission. Then there's other ones who have already done some of that work. They know this is where they want to go, these are the claims we want to make. And then we have yet another category that sometimes comes to us and says, “Okay, these are what our competitors say. We have a similar ingredient. How can we differentiate ourselves?” So in those latter cases, we engage our regulatory team along with our clinical team and work up a protocol or a design to address those things. And that's one of our services as well, is even before engaging in clinical, we can have these kind of design brainstorming sessions, reports that will develop alongside our clients, to really look at, what's the landscape look like, where else could you go, what else could your product possibly do, based on literature, based on the science that you've done, and what kind of novel claims or novel designs could we do, and then subsequently, what claims will we get out of those if successful? We can never guarantee the success, but what we can do is risk mitigate it as much as possible. It all comes down to at the end, does the product work, if we've designed everything well and robustly, that's really what it comes down to, does the product work?