Ever wonder how scientists can announce that a food or supplement is the next best thing, only to later reverse their opinion?

“It’s really kind of a numbers game,” said Steve Nissen, CEO of Metabolic Technologies Inc., an Ames-based producer of ingredients for the food supplement industry. “You really have to test something in hundreds of people rather than tens of people to get reliable results.”

The Center for Designing Foods to Improve Nutrition, operated by Iowa State University, will soon be able to accommodate those bigger test populations. At its Oct. 21 quarterly meeting, the Biosciences Alliance of Iowa approved $700,000 in state funding for a project that will allow the center to expand from the campus to office space at the ISU Research Park in Ames.

The project was one of three selected from 19 proposals submitted by Iowa’s state universities for funding. The money comes from a $2.7 million Grow Iowa Values Fund allocation the alliance was granted in June by the Iowa Department of Economic Development board.

The Biosciences Alliance also approved $450,200 for the purchase of equipment and software for advanced genomics research at the University of Iowa, and $500,000 toward the creation of a disease research center at U of I in which health companies can create animal models of human diseases.

The Biosciences Alliance, formed last year to advance Iowa’s biotechnology industries, includes representatives from businesses, agriculture, economic development groups, government agencies, the state universities and other higher education institutions.

“We looked for projects that could support multiple businesses, not only nascent businesses growing around the university, but also around the state,” said Chris Nelson, the alliance’s chairman and president of Kemin Industries Inc. in Des Moines. “The nutrition center at Iowa State, for instance, not only helps researchers but also food ingredient companies to have a fabulous place to go to do studies.”

By making ISU’s nutrition center more convenient to both research companies and the subjects who volunteer for testing, the Biosciences Alliance hopes to bring back millions of dollars in research that Iowa biotechnology companies are now contracting out to facilities in other states, said Paul Flakoll, director of the Center for Designing Foods to Improve Nutrition.

“I think what kind of brought this to the top was there was a lot of business support for it,” he said. “Everybody was saying, ‘Yeah, this is something we really need.’”

Metabolic Technologies, together with Kemin Industries, Proliant Health Ingredients and Starch Design, all Central Iowa-based biotechnology companies, have collectively committed to conducting $1.93 million in research activity at the nutrition center.

“I think this is going to form the basis for some big things,” Nissen said. “There are a lot of companies that have clinical laboratories in nutrition, but they don’t have this sort of one-stop center. I think it will be a real attraction for other businesses down the road once we get this going.”

MTI, which in its 15-year-history has developed ingredients used in a number of nutrition supplements, is currently using the center to monitor volunteers who are taking a Vitamin D supplement intended to maintain muscle mass in elderly adults.

“It’s kind of hard to get 100 or 200 people on campus to get tested, Nissen said. “It’s going to be much more logistically friendly out here at the research park. Doing testing on that number of people is nearly impossible up on campus. So this center is critical for testing large number of people as we will need to do.”

The center currently accommodates about $10 million to $11 million in research annually. Consequently, the commitment from the companies and the alliance’s funding “is not an insignificant amount,” said Flakoll. “It’s very helpful to have these funds to help take this to a different level. I think this allows us to really move ahead.”