AI pioneer Nuritas hints at peptide pipeline spanning sleep, cognition, immunity, & more
Nuritas and its Nuritas MagnifierNπΦ platform offers the potential to unlock plant-based, efficacious solutions to a myriad of health problems, with a reported success rate of up to 1,200 times that of traditional R&D, in 80% less time.
The company has partnered with leading food and pharma companies including Nestle, Mars, Sumitomo Corporation and Pharmavite. Founded in Ireland, Nuritas recently expanded into the US with new North American headquarters in Connecticut. The company’s founder & CEO, Dr Nora Khaldi relocated to the US to lead the company through its new growth phase.
Speaking with NutraIngredients-USA at the recent SupplySide West show in Las Vegas, Dr Khaldi said that the US “is the place to be for innovative solutions that are transformative from a health perspective”.
“People [in the US] like innovation,” she said. “They are willing to look at innovation in a different way to other places in the world. It’s also an educated population.”
Sports nutrition brand Glaxon recently launched the first consumer product incorporating Nuritas’ PeptiStrong ingredient derived from a peptide unlocked from fava beans. PeptiStrong has reported muscle building, anti-muscle atrophy and anti-inflammation properties. The ingredients recently achieved self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status.
GRAS status of PeptiStrong™ was achieved after an intensive review of safety by an independent panel of scientific experts. The panel concluded that the fava bean protein hydrolysate was safe in accordance with the US Food and Drug Administration for proposed food and beverage uses.
The company’s other commercially available ingredient is PeptiYouth (to slow cellular aging), while they also worked with BASF to develop PeptAIde for modulation of inflammation with respect to exercise.
Dr Khaldi told us: “We have a really interesting pipeline coming together from very large problems like glucose management, sleep, cognition, immune modulation (but very specialized immune modulation), and many more in the human health and animal health space.”
Identifying potential ingredient candidates using artificial intelligence becomes faster and more cost-effective because instead of just randomly screening and testing, you can use AI to narrow candidates down to a few that are going to make it, she explained.
The language of nature
Nuritas focuses on peptides because they are the “biggest universe of molecules that humans know about,” she said. “Some people say there’s an infinite number of peptides. But the reason peptides are interesting is that peptides are the major signaling molecule in the human body. A lot of processes happen through peptides. It’s the language of nature.
“As we age, those signals fade away, so you want to give it a boost [for] energy, better sleep, immune response, better strength and muscle retention, better glucose management, and so forth.”
Dr Khaldi explained that Nuritas always looks at ingredient discovery through the lens of a specific consumer need.
“If you look at the ingredients we use today, many of them were developed generations ago and retrofitted into a consumer need,” she said. “They’ve been found ad hoc in a lab somewhere, and then decades later, ‘oh, this is an anti-inflammatory so let’s put it in this product’.
“The question is, how do we bring this thinking of pharma into this [nutrition] world where we actually start with a consumer need and then translate that into what does that mean from a biological perspective? Then create a solution specifically for that consumer need.
“And adding to the patentability of the product as well, because you know what your molecules are, how they work, what they do, how they signal, you can now bring that patenting from pharma into the consumer world.”
Watch the video above for more from Dr Khaldi.
