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Season 5, Episode 1: The Future of Health Is In Peptides with Dr. Nora Khaldi

Show Notes

Dr. Nora Khaldi is a renowned biotech entrepreneur, mathematician, scientist and founder and CEO at Nuritas, an AI-enabled synthetic biology company focused on creating the next generation of intelligent ingredients. Dr. Khaldi is an industry leader in the field of life science, biotechnology and food technology.  She holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution, Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics from Trinity College Ireland and a masters in mathematics from Aix-Marseille University.  Her research has focused primarily on research evolution and comparative genomics. Nora holds over 30 patents and is a highly published author.  

Together Dr. Khaldi and I dive into the world of peptides and the infinite possibilities of the Nuritas peptide finder. We explore the characteristics of peptides that can change and improve targeted areas, including maintaining muscle health while losing weight, skin health and wrinkles through collagen production and reduced inflammation, and glucose, craving control, sleep promotion, and skin health. Dr. Khaldi reviews the PeptiStrong timeline, highlights targeted populations and shares observations from her personal use. She also addresses the possibilities and concerns associated with AI, reminding us how scientists can enhance their research with its assistance.

I’m your host, Evelyne Lambrecht, thank you for designing a well world with us.

Episode Resources:

Dr. Nora Khaldi

Design for Health Resources:

Designs for Health

Research Blog: Decoding Peptides: The Body’s Little Helpers

Research Blog: Bioactive Peptides From the Fava Bean: The Future of Muscular Health?

Designs for Health Practitioner Exclusive Drug Nutrient Depletion and Interaction Checker

Visit the Designs for Health Research and Education Library which houses medical journals, protocols, webinars, and our blog.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro.

03:09 Dr. Khali’s interest in mathematics and life sciences converged as her career progressed.

5:58 The moment that peptides became the focus of Dr. Khali’s research involved wallaby milk.

9:27 Details about peptides and the infinite possibilities of the Nuritas peptide finder.

13:03 The molecular universe of an apple includes more molecular data than all social media put together. Dr. Khali details this library of peptides.

15:44 A timeline of the peptide finder’s work and how its inaccuracies are corrected over time to identify solutions.

18:14 Determining which areas to focus on and bring to market starts with securing both health and longevity.

21:16 Pillars in seeking peptides that can change and improve targeted areas, including maintaining muscle health while losing weight.

24:01 Discovering the muscle building mechanisms that became the ingredients in PeptiStrong.

27:51 Why can’t humans access all nutrients that are hidden in plants?

31:42 The role of AI in identifying properties and the role of humans in ensuring accuracy.

35:25 Pre-market control testing markers and models and findings from early human clinical trials.

42:18 PeptiStrong timeline and targeted populations and observations from Dr. Khaldi’s personal use.

47:15 Designs for Health CEO Amardeep Kahlon’s testimonial for performance peptides.

49:15 The combination of mathematics and computer science is AI, and scientists can enhance their research with its assistance.

52:25 PeptiYouth focuses on skin health and wrinkles through collagen production and reduced inflammation.

54:42 Upcoming areas of Nuritas peptide research include glucose, craving control, sleep promotion, and skin health.

58:50 Is it possible that the answers for cancers and other diseases might be found in peptides?

1:01:27 Dr. Nora Khaldi personal favorite supplements, top health practices, and her changing post-pandemic views on remote work.

Transcript

Voiceover: Conversations for Health dedicated to engaging discussions with industry experts exploring evidence-based cutting-edge research and practical tips. Our mission is to empower you with knowledge, debunk myths, and provide you with clinical insights. This podcast is provided as an educational resource for healthcare practitioners only. This podcast represents the views and opinions of the host and their guests, and does not represent the views or opinions of Designs for Health Inc. This podcast does not constitute medical advice. The statements contained in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Now let’s embark on a journey towards optimal well-being one conversation at a time. Here’s your host, Evelyne Lambrecht.

Evelyne: Welcome to Conversations for Health. I’m your host Evelyne, and I’m so excited to talk to Dr. Nora Khaldi renowned biotech entrepreneur and scientist and founder and CEO of Nuritas. Welcome Nora.

Dr. Nora: Hi Evelyne. Thanks for having me. Really excited.

Evelyne: Yeah. First of all, what is lighting you up this week?

Dr. Nora: There’s a few things, but one of the things is that we’re working as a team, we’re launching a few of our ingredients, which I’ll talk about at SSW, SupplySide West at the end of this month.

Evelyne: Oh, fun.

Dr. Nora: It’s incredible to see the team work together under a lot of time constraint. We’re organizing a workshop, to get the workshop together, the marketing, and what excites me is really see the team work hand in hand to achieve such a launch in SSW.

Evelyne: That’s amazing. I’ve never been to SupplySide West, but I have been to Natural Products Expo many times, but SupplySide West sounds so fun. That’s the ingredients one.

Dr. Nora: Yeah.

Evelyne: Dr. Nora Khaldi is an industry leader in the field of life science, biotechnology and food technology. She has a PhD in molecular evolution and bioinformatics from Trinity College in Dublin as well as a master’s in mathematics from Aix-Marseille University. Her research has focused primarily on protein evolution and comparative genomics. Some of her publications have been placed in the library of the top 2% of published articles in the fields of biology and medicine. She was one of the first to show horizontal gene transfer between multicellular species. And she’s the founder of Nuritas, an AI-enabled synthetic biology company, creating the next generation of intelligent ingredients to disrupt the health and wellness nutrition industry. Under Nora’s leadership, Nuritas has amassed the world’s largest natural peptide library with over 9 million peptides discovered and became the first life science company ever to an AI discovered functional ingredient to the human clinical phase. Super interesting. We have so much to talk about Nora, but first of all, how did you even get into this? How did you get into AI? What is your story?

Dr. Nora: My story, Evelyne, so I always attracted to pure mathematics and computer science. So I studied that initially like you mentioned, and then always also attracted to life sciences. And at that time there was no way to actually mingle both together. You could do mathematics on one side and life science on the other, so you have to choose. So I chose mathematics initially, but then I kept looking for a way to bring that into the area of life sciences. And it’s only during my PhD where I could bring both together and it was what we call comparative genomics, bioinformatics. And the whole point of that was to look at different species and understand how different species produce different molecules that could eventually create molecules that could be drug precursors, et cetera. And that’s where you mentioned, for example, horizontal gene transfer. It was interesting to discover that actually you carry it. So these are multicellular species could actually communicate together, but also transfer genes between them.

Up to then it was only known prokaryotes, that is one cell organisms could transfer bacteria, but anything above two cells, it was very hard and actually impossible. It wasn’t known. And that discovery that I made actually put into question all the phylogenetic trees that we use when we relate species together because ultimately if eukaryotes can actually exchange genes, a lot of the connectivity between species that we’ve made is actually not correct.

So that’s how I started off and I worked in drug discovery initially and then so using mathematics, computer science to accelerate the discovery of drugs. And then at the end, after my PhD, this is where I came into the area of nutrition. And I discovered a whole area, a need for change and improvement and especially from an ingredient perspective. So a lot of the molecules used within the nutritional space have some issues in different ways, and some of them are not fully characterized. Some of them don’t have clear mechanisms of action. Some of them change depending on the batch production and there’s very little knowledge of how nutrients affect the human body. And that’s how I started working in this field, bringing again, different ways of thinking, again, mathematics, computer science in this area as well.

Evelyne: Then what was sort of that moment when you decided that you wanted to study peptides?

Dr. Nora: I worked, Evelyne, on many different types of molecules throughout my career. Small molecules, biologics, proteins, et cetera. Peptides were always interesting because they’re the major signaling molecule within any species. So a lot of what any species does, including us on, everything we do includes very often a peptide signal and that’s why peptides are really interesting. And then it was interesting as well when I started to look into the regulatory framework of peptides and understand a little bit more of that framework. But ultimately what really got me into this field, because I was working on the pharma side, is a talk, a presentation I heard at an event. It was in Napa Valley actually. It was an Australian that was presenting a talk about wallaby milk. And it was really interesting for me because I knew very little about milk in general, but it was interesting to show that the wallaby changes completely development depending on the milk they were given.

So wallabies are marsupials, they come out as fetuses, they live within the pouch and they’re given different milks depending on their age, by the mother. And depending on what milk the wallaby will get, either develop their internal systems, so that is brain, gut and the external stays very weak from a muscle for perspective or they reverse. And they did a lot of research and they found that the milk changes with time. And depending on the age of the milk or how far the milk is in the development cycle, the content of the milk changes and triggers development of different parts. Initially it’s all internal. You have to have a very high immune system, very strong immune system. You have to have a brain that’s well-developed, a gut that’s well-developed and with time then you need more muscle fur, et cetera to get you out of the pouch.

And when they looked into it further, they found that basically a lot of the molecules in that milk changed with time, peptides being one of the main ones there as well as other molecules, but peptides being the main ones there. And for me that was a aha moment where I’m like, wow, if someone could actually decipher those molecules that changed, you could literally identify molecules in nature that could do anything and improve human health dramatically.

Evelyne: That is such a cool story. I love that, how your brain works, that you question that and then you were like, let me just create a company from this, which we’ll get into. I also find it fascinating about the milk part because we know that human breast milk, it also changes depending on the time of feeding, but also if the mother gets sick, then the composition of breast milk also changes to protect the baby. It’s so cool.

Dr. Nora: It’s really interesting, Evelyne, because it’s an extension to the mother’s immune system, and that’s from an evolutionary perspective, it is thought that milk is just an extension of the immune system of the mother that carries into the baby. With other functionalities as well, like with wallabies, brain development, gut development, et cetera.

Evelyne: So you decided to start this company Nuritas to try and find these peptides, right? Tell me more about the Nuritas Peptide Finder. How does that work? How many years does it take? And then what is the AI part of it?

Dr. Nora: Okay, so just maybe step back in terms of peptides. Again, peptides are simply short proteins. I think many people know what a protein is. A peptide would have the same benefits of a protein from a nutritional perspective, built from amino acids, but ultimately has a plus. So bioactive peptides would have an extra benefit compared to proteins in that they are signaling molecules and they can confer a signal within the body. They can tell the body what to do, unlike a protein. And that’s one of the major reasons we went after peptides or I went after peptides initially. The realities that peptides have been known in the past to be poorly bioavailable, poorly stable, but highly efficacious at low dose, but poorly available, poorly bioavailable, et cetera. And the reason for that is that many of the studies, if you look at the studies of peptides, even within the pharmaceutical space, it’s all focused on hormones which have a short half-life, so they don’t survive for long.

And as a consequence, people think that all peptides live short lives and they’re not bioavailable. But that’s because what we studied as humans is only a small part of the universe of peptides. There are many, many peptides out there that are already available, that can resist digestion, et cetera, that as humans we’ve not explored because peptides is the biggest universe known to humankind from a data perspective. So it’s very hard for humans to data mine at all. You need machines to help you. Hence, we created what we call the Magnifier technology. The AI part of it is called Nuritas Peptide Finder, Nπϕ™. And that basically AI system allows us to explore the universe of peptides, again, bigger than all stars in all the galaxies, et cetera.

So it’s a massive, massive universe of molecules. And to identify the subsets of peptides that have a functional benefit with a clear mechanism of action that are going to be already available and perform in the body, but then get obviously degraded when the signal occurs. And that was the fundamental goal of the technology, which is today would be impossible without the technology. You couldn’t really, again, it takes decades and decades to identify an active molecule and hundreds and hundreds of millions. And without a technology to help you, the chances of finding something at the end are very slim. Hence, the need for mathematics, computer science, which now we call AI to decipher that universe and help scientists explore further and identify these incredible peptides within nature that are transforming and can transform human health.

Evelyne: I think that’s just so cool that there is this whole section of the plant world and there are so many things in the plant world that we just don’t know yet that we don’t understand. And I think it’s just so cool that you created this company to discover more in this world. And so I’m curious more about the library part of it. I think I read somewhere that it’s almost like a Facebook of peptides. Can you talk about that part of it?

Dr. Nora: Yeah, absolutely. And Evelyne, you mentioned as well, how many molecules are in plants. And actually I used to say this pretty often, but I don’t say it anymore and I should say it more, but there’s more data in one apple. I mean molecular data in one apple, then all social media put together since the inception of social media. And we know so, so little about that universe, molecular universe within just one apple. And we should know more. We ought to know more because we eat these different sources, we consume them, and yet we know so, so little. And so coming back to the question on the library, what we decided, so every source material would have about 30 billion peptides. You take any plant, any fungal, any fungi, any marine source as humans and any source, we would have about 30 billion different peptides. And it’s very hard obviously to go off and test one at a time in the lab. So you need ways of exploring.

Today we explore about 6 trillion and that’s growing peptides. And on those so far we’ve nailed about 9 million. And again, that constantly grows in terms of numbers of peptides that we fully have characterized. That means we know their mechanism of action, what they do in the body, how to actually find them and what source material they exist in. And how to actually get them from the source because there are many molecules in different sources that you can’t access. As humans, we can’t find a way to make them scalable and access them. And this is the 6 trillion, the universe we’re constantly exploring the 9 million other peptides we’ve now fully characterized. And PeptiStrong is one of the ones we’ve taken forward, but ultimately 9 million. And that’s again, constantly growing. Every time we run the technology, we’ll find more and more.

Evelyne: That’s so fascinating. And how long have you been working on this technology?

Dr. Nora: Long time, Evelyne. So we spent, in order to create a technology or an AI technology that can explore a source material and identify within it health benefits. It takes years to develop that data because you can’t just go off and buy the data online, you can’t just go off and Google it, it doesn’t work that way. You literally have to create it from scratch within the lab. So we spent many years, so eight years in total where we had to, before we started commercializing, where we had to see or monitor how different cell types behave under the influence of different peptides. Either one peptide or combinations of peptides and really understand how the cell behaves on tissues as well. And then in humans and then preclinical, we’ve done a lot of preclinical work and the question was how do you then tie all that in into a way that you can actually pull information from?

So we spent eight years collecting the data and creating a machine behind the scene that can understand that data and interact with it. And I always explain this in terms of an AI system is like a baby that you’re trying to educate and the education is really important in terms of how that baby is going to turn out in the future and what you give it is really important. But the data is not just available, you have to create it. So we spent a lot of money and time on generating that data and testing the AI. So the AI is recursive, so you give it a problem and it solves it. You then test the solution and see if it’s accurate, how accurate is it? And then if it’s not accurate, you tell the AI you’re not accurate, you got it wrong, go back and do it again. And it keeps doing it. And over many years it gets to a point where you now can give it any health area, muscle health, you can give it sleep, anxiety, hair growth, certain areas of application, and it will identify solutions within each.

Evelyne: This is so fascinating, Nora, and I feel like it’s limitless in terms of what you can discover. So then how do you or how did you decide which areas you actually want to focus on in order to have a peptide that you want to bring to market?

Dr. Nora: It’s a good question, Evelyne. So at the core of what personally drives me is always human health at the core of it, hence applying, my whole career has been centered around that. And then Nuritas obviously has been centered around it as well. And the way we look at it at Nuritas is really about, and it’s not potentially the way we’re selling it, but ultimately we look at what we call the healthagevity. And so how many healthy years can you extend someone’s life? And that’s what we’re actually focused on in terms of, for example, we’ll start with the major areas that actually could help humans globally, one of which is muscle health in general. So by increasing strength slightly, you can reduce all cause mortality. That includes all cancers, all cardiovascular issues, all metabolic issues, immune issues by 17%. That’s bigger than any drug can do. And even combinations of drugs.

So actually the core of what we always do is human health. But also going after problems that are going to be transformative in terms of healthy years lived as opposed to six years, extra six years, but extra healthy years. And that’s the first we start with that. Second part, we look at what exists within the area of focus. So if it’s muscle health, what other types of ingredients exist within the space? Can we, are all those performing to the point where that problem is gone or are they not? And clearly we all have issues today. So a lot of the ingredients, so they’re not performing to the level they should. And the question is, can we create with the technology, knowing the technology, can we create something better that addresses what the consumer is looking for?

Because today, Evelyne, if you look at all the ingredients that we’re using today of all the molecules, they’ve been made 1700 years ago. They’re not new and they’ve been retrofitted to what consumers are looking for today. And that’s not the right way because none of them have been discovered for that purpose. It’s just that randomly, oh, they happen to have maybe an anti-inflammatory effect, so let’s use them.

Evelyne: Oh, interesting.

Dr. Nora: But none of them have been developed for that consumer in mind. And what we’ve done is reverse that. We start with a clear demand. We say we’re going to actually create a solution that just does that and we want to perform better than what exists. Or in combination, but ultimately we need something differentiated that outperforms. And we start off with the big pillars. So muscle health is a massive area. It’s broad, but it’s massive because it’s important for our mobility, our energy, our metabolism. And with age it degrades significantly, from the age of 28 actually starts already degrading. Whether you exercise or not, it may help for sure, but you still, your cellular energy, your lean muscle cells decline in function in general.

The question is how do you maintain that functionality over time? And that’s one area that we focused on. And that includes then people that want to maintain their lean muscle and energy, people that want to be vital at later years and continue their everyday tasks as usual. Or people in sports nutrition that want to grow and be able to push further. That mechanism is fundamentally the same between different age groups and people wanting to lose weight while maintaining muscle mass. Literally that mechanism again is the same between both, between all these different angles. And with the technology we’re capable of creating mechanistically or discovering peptides in nature that wouldn’t mechanistically do exactly that to outperform other ingredients. And then separately start with, we looked for example at glucose management. So it’s one where GLP-like agonists, we have one in clinical today, and that one the clinical should end end of this year.

And again, this one, if you reduce HbA1c or glucose in general, HbA1c by 0.1% in blood, you extend life expectancy a healthy life by five to 10 years. That’s massive. That’s not our research. This is large scale research that has been done in the UK. So those kind of slight changes with an ingredient can have huge impact. And that’s how we start. We start with a massive impact connected to what exists, are the solutions really working? Why are the solutions not working? What can we add that’s going to be differentiated? And then we engaged the AI system to discover it and then our scientists take it further into tests and biology work into human and so forth.

Evelyne: I think this is so timely because the conversation around muscle health has really grown. Like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon says, “Muscle is the organ of longevity.” And so I think that people are really, really listening to that. So with your first peptide that you came out with, PeptiStrong, which you already mentioned, what were the key areas that you were looking for? And is it like you tell your AI system, this is very simplified, but you tell your system, okay, I want you to find me something that has this, this and this characteristic and then it searches all the plants and then you find it?

Dr. Nora: Yeah, similar to that, Evelyne, actually, you’re on the right track. I agree, muscle health is a massive, lean muscle is huge. It’s connected, like I said, to our metabolism, to our movements, to our energy. And now lots of research is showing that it’s connected directly to our bone health, our immune system and so forth. And also what you notice, which I actually only started noticing the past five years, looking at different people, it’s the first organ that visibly you see age. The sagging on the face, that’s literally muscle wastage and declining in lean muscle activity. And again, that’s face, but ultimately in your body in general. So muscle is key. The way we did it is we looked at, with the help of the AI system, we looked at all any molecule that exists out there within this space, whether pharmaceutical or whether food grade doesn’t really matter. We want to understand the different mechanisms that were out there.

And what we noticed is that usually each molecule will have one clear mechanism only, for example, mTOR, phosphorylation of S-VI through mTOR or may have an anti-inflammatory effect, which may lead into better strength if you take it for long, et cetera, or other types of mechanisms. And what we, apelin, for example, is one other mechanism that we were looking at. So basically we looked at the different mechanisms and you said, “How about if we created or discovered an ingredient? Is it possible to discover an ingredient that would have all the different mechanisms or the main mechanism into one?” To make sure that ultimately you get an overall effect that’s beneficial. And what we focused on then are the major ones, which is obviously phosphorylation of S6 through the mTOR pathway downstream, not upstream to be more precise, anti-inflammation and then Atrogin, MuRF-1 gene expression reduction because those are connected to breakdown of muscle. You want to reduce breakdown of muscle, you want to improve protein synthesis, that’s for the mTOR and you want to reduce inflammation. So a combination of those three.

So we set out with a technology to look for a source material that would have all three peptides together. And we looked at, like I said, we looked at many, many, many different sources. And actually fava bean happened to have all three together. And not only did it have it together, there was a way actually to produce it because like I said, very often you can’t actually access many of these peptides or any other molecules as well. And in this case, we could access them. Now obviously when you eat the fava bean, your body breaks it up randomly so you don’t get the benefit. What we’re doing is identifying those benefits are hidden in nature and actually making them available so humans can reap that benefit as well.

Evelyne: I find that so interesting because we do consume our food and it’s like the proteins, the carbohydrates, the fats, but also all of the nutrients. But then there are these nutrients that we can’t access, but what is the reason why we can’t access them?

Dr. Nora: So plants have, each species is not out to make the other species happier. They’re out for themselves. So plants are not out to make humans happier and give them what they’re finding. They’re out to protect themselves. And what we’re simply doing is exploring nature and bringing those hundreds of millions of years of evolution of these plants to create something that works for them, to humans. And when I say plants, I say that this is a general, I should include fungal systems, marine sources, and other sources that these have spent hundreds of millions of years evolving certain activities that help the plant survive better, protect itself and so forth. And those mechanisms are ones we’re trying to bring to human. We’re just helping humans identify them faster through the technology and then we’re making them possible. But ultimately, it’s not that, your question on why can’t we access them, it’s because again, the plant is not made to create things that our human can access. The plant is made to create things it can access. And as humans, we’ve explored very little of what’s in nature. And only today we can explore a lot more.

Evelyne: I think it’s so interesting. It reminds me of glucosinolate in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables and other compounds that are produced to protect the plant or how adaptogens work through a hormetic response. Well, a lot of those compounds work through or hormetic response with a biphasic dosing. Is that right?

Dr. Nora: Yep.

Evelyne: I don’t know if I said that right. Yeah. Or how a lot of plants work through that biphasic dose response. And so it’s just interesting that there’s this whole other class, the peptides that also does this. But I hadn’t really heard about that before, so this is just blowing my mind. So you found-

Dr. Nora: Yeah.

Evelyne: Did you want to add anything to that?

Dr. Nora: No, but it is interesting to see that these molecules have been hidden, let’s say with PeptiYouth, which is totally different peptide, which you can talk about later. But it’s one we discovered in the roots of the pea. And it’s interesting because it’s part of a protein that has been there for over a hundred million years protecting the roots from attack and drought and all harsh conditions. And the plant has been using it for as long as that. And without the technology, we couldn’t find that peptide. It would’ve taken again, millions of years to discover it. PeptiStrong itself would’ve taken 30 million years to discover that combination of peptides with the techniques used today in the laboratory. And that means impossible, 30 million years. It’s like, okay, that equates to the impossible. So I think, yeah, it’s incredible to see so many amazing molecules in nature and actually to bring them to life. And every time, I think you mentioned to me at the start, what gets you going and what positive thing happened this week, and I think that’s every week.

Evelyne: Wow. That’s amazing. So after you identified that these peptides in the fava bean have these properties, then what is the next step and how do you know that the AI is accurate?

Dr. Nora: So the AI doesn’t work alone. It’s plugged into a lab with humans. So we have obviously, basically a machine and humans speaking together, and we built Nuritas that way from the beginning. And it was super hard, by the way, we didn’t touch on that, but integrating humans with machines is actually extremely hard because they speak very, very, very different languages. And you have to translate and you get it to a point where now they kind of speak the same language, but it took a long time to get them to understand each other. So once the AI finds something in a source material, that information is sent to scientists within lab, those scientists then produce it. So they’ll go off, look, produce it, understand it physically, and then go off and test it into different areas. In vitro testing initially on cells in the area focus.

So let’s say the AI was pointed towards muscle health, it’ll be an phosphorylation of S6, for example. It’ll be a phosphorylation of S6 assay. If it’s genetically, it’s about reducing gene expression of those two genes. I mentioned MuRF-1 and Atrogin-1, then it’s going to be about that. So you test it and the scientists will test it in the lab. And depending on, and those results that are fed back instantly in a raw format to the AI system. The AI system then makes up its mind. It’s like, okay, I’ve made, this one I got it wrong. This one, I got it kind of right, but not really right. This one is really good. And that recursive nature keeps going. We don’t take anything forward. We try and optimize it as much as possible.

So for PeptiStrong, we went through so many different optimizations in terms of identifying the right peptides and the right sources, et cetera. And then once the scientists are happy and the results look really good and they’re constant. So no matter how many times you repeat them, you’re finding the same exact results, then we move to the next stage, which is preclinical, and then to the next phase, which is clinical. And so double-blind placebo clinicals where we’re testing the peptides in humans for certain conditions. The first clinical is always a learning clinical in terms of we’re not really clear with, we know the mechanism in general, but we measure quite a few things to see how that mechanism really impacts different areas.

And then we do a second clinical and a third clinical. And our goal as a company is constantly add more and more clinical data to our ingredients no matter what ingredients. So bringing that science, bringing that medical part. Understanding the mechanism and creating things that are both food grade, so they’re natural food grade, but also have a full understanding and characterization and clinical data package that’s constantly growing is something we spend a lot of time and money on and is something we’ll always do. And that’s how we developed most of our peptides. So part of it is human. The other part is, the initial part is AI based.

Evelyne: And I’m curious about that part in between the pre-clinicals, are you testing bioavailability, bioaccessibility? What is all the testing that you do before you take it to humans?

Dr. Nora: Yeah. So the interesting thing, Evelyne, is that the current success of our is about 80% clinical success. That’s massive. That’s unheard of in the field of life sciences in general, or sciences in general because usually there’s a big rate of failure in clinical simply because people don’t understand their molecule that much. When you have a mixture, for example, when you have a mixture and you’re going into human clinical, you don’t know what your active is. So it’s very hard to know if it’s going to be already available, if the active is going to get degraded, if the active is actually still there at the right dose. So there’s so many different elements that are part of a molecule not moving forward successfully.

So what we did is create, and again, that took quite a few years to build the data behind it, but we built models of digestion. We built models of oral availability. We had to build models of stability. So the molecule needs to be stable in certain formats. There are many molecules are great, we add them to a formulation, they’re dead and they’re not active and we don’t want that. So the peptides have to be robust in the different formulations we put them in and many other aspects that we look at. And that’s why when we do all that, with the help of the AI initially discovering the right peptides, when we do all this work in the lab, the success rate in clinical is superbly high, much higher than usual.

Evelyne: That’s super interesting. And then with the human clinical trials, we don’t have to go into detail on all of those because I’ll probably interview Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller, who’s done some of the studies. But in a nutshell, you mentioned some of those mechanisms, but what did some of the human clinical trials show?

Dr. Nora: So the first one we did was we wanted to look at mimic loss of muscle through immobilization, so let’s say bed, rest or injury. And what we did was casted individuals. So initially as a 30, we couldn’t actually get more than 30. It was literally 30. 30 was the max professor could get. We went on looking for 30 and we got 30, but we casted the legs of different individuals for a week. And then we removed the cast. And the goal was to go head-to-head with protein or milk protein concentrate or isolate. And the goal here was to show whether we could conserve muscle and we could conserve strength. And also what we noticed, so at the end of… And by the way, when we removed the cast, they just went back to a normal lifestyle. It wasn’t that we exercised them, just went back normally to a normal lifestyle as many people do by the way. And what we noticed is that the individuals on PeptiStrong, the PeptiStrong group, were stronger at the end of the trial than when they actually started the trial, which is crazy.

Evelyne: Wow.

Dr. Nora: You’d expect them just to return to baseline, but they were stronger. And compared to the protein, which is the standard of care today in all these groups is standard of care in immobilization, et cetera, which went back to about 68% of baseline. So they only recouped 68% of their strengths. While that’s at the very end of the trial, while ours were actually stronger than when they started with no exercise. The second trial was a trial where we took, we said, okay, let’s go for a different group here and let’s go for an athlete. So an athlete type of group. And athlete, it’s very hard to actually show differences in athletes. They do this all the time, day in, day out. So it’s very, actually, you’d expect a slight changes there.

And what we did is create this induced, induced muscle damage by exhaustive leg extensions. So we did a lot of leg extensions, we exhausted them. And what happened then is that three days into it, we noticed the same thing. We noticed in the first trial that the difference between placebo and our PeptiStrong group was about 120% extra strength compared to the placebo. And also 60% more energy, muscular energy. That means they pushed 60% harder when they were on PeptiStrong. So that’s muscular energy as well. And the third one, in this one, we actually included women because in the first clinical, and I’m guessing many of the doctors would understand that when you’re first doing it clinical, you want to reduce any variations. But now we’ve broadened it to both women and men in the last one.

And this one was a two-month one where again, individuals exercised three times a week. I think there was about 17 individuals within the clinical. And what we noticed is a 17% increase in strength, which is huge. And also that they doubled their muscular energy. That means they actually could do twice as more in the same time when they were on the PeptiStrong group. And one thing we didn’t expect, which came out of the results as well, is that we analyze also bone density because there’s more and more publications showing connectivity between strength and bone density and muscle and bone density. And as to why that happens, there are different opinions, but no one really knows a clear mechanism. But ultimately what we noticed is a 0.7% increase in bone density, and that equates to about a year of supplementation with vitamin D and vitamin and calcium.

Evelyne: Wow, that’s huge.

Dr. Nora: So in two months. Yes. That’s huge. And that was a good result as well. So that’s kind of some of the clinicals we’ve made. And again, those are three where again, we’re adding and adding as we understand the ingredient more.

Evelyne: That’s amazing. And how long ago did you first identify PeptiStrong?

Dr. Nora: So PeptiStrong as a whole. Okay, if we add, because there were times where it was on the shelf because we’re doing something else. But if you add up from start to end, again, unheard of in the area of clinicals, it is a two-year cycle.

Evelyne: Oh, wow.

Dr. Nora: From the time we said we’re going to create X, we’re going to create an ingredient that’s going to literally be better than everything that’s used in this area, and here’s how it’s going to work, and here are the different populations that could actually help. To asking the AI system to explore, to making it, to going through all the parts I mentioned to you earlier into then commercialization, at least to start commercially. That’s a two-year cycle.

Evelyne: That’s very quick.

Dr. Nora: Yeah.

Evelyne: That’s amazing.

Dr. Nora: For this area, for sure.

Evelyne: Yeah. So that first trial that you shared, the implications of that are very interesting because I feel like when you first hear about PeptiStrong and you talk about the muscle protein synthesis and preventing muscle breakdown, muscle catabolism, you think like, oh, it’s for people who are working out and it’s for athletes. But the fact that you had people who were immobilized, I’m thinking of, well, maybe people who just aren’t working out, but people who are recovering from an injury, recovering from surgery, recovering from an accident, maybe diseases of muscle wasting. Are you going to be studying more around that?

Dr. Nora: Yeah, absolutely. For sure. So actually it’s in the plant for the next where we zone into a population and grow the clinical there. But ultimately very clear, the mechanism is the same, like I mentioned. Ultimately the mechanism and the biology of what are the triggers of muscle health in general, how to increase its longevity as a whole, the muscle cell, how to improve its metabolism, how to create more mitochondria within the cell, how can it perform better? I think that as a whole is super important. And yeah, that’s what we’re focused on.

Evelyne: I’m curious about your personal results using it, Nora. So how long have you been taking it and what have you noticed?

Dr. Nora: Yes. So I remember I was taking it before we actually commercialize it. So I try some of the molecules earlier on and even just personally for myself, is this thing really working? And what I noticed personally is, you know how you get those dips of energy during the day where sometimes you’re like, you’re fine, but you’re a little tired and it comes up and down. Caffeine does not work on me, Evelyne, at all. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. So I don’t drink coffee or take any caffeine because it doesn’t work on me. It makes me more nervous. And when I started taking PeptiStrong, that’s the first thing I noticed. It’s kind of a stabilization. So it’s not that you’re hyper, but you don’t have those dips and you feel more energetic. You don’t feel as much pain when you’re exercising and you can push. So for sure, anyone that has taken it will notice that. Over short periods of time, you can do a lot more and you do have a lot more energy. So those are the first observations you have.

And I remember last year at SSW, because you know that, one thing that we don’t mention often enough, but your muscle health is related directly to your longevity. So your bio age, so your bio age is related to your strength and the stronger you are, the younger you are biologically. And we created a hand grip initially just to measure people’s bio age. And we’re looking at how that actually enhances pretty quickly over two, three days using PeptiStrong where their bio age is going down because their strength is going up. And that’s actually really interesting. So that’s something we did actually at the SupplySide West last year as we were taking PeptiStrong to market.

Evelyne: That is really cool and very interesting. I just started taking it yesterday.

Dr. Nora: Cool.

Evelyne: So I’m curious to see what changes I notice. I also feel like this would be a good time to share a little testimonial from our Designs for Health CEO, Amardeep. I’m going to read it to you because we just heard it last week, and I think all of us thought, oh my goodness, this is great. So he said, “I’m currently training for an ultra marathon, 44 miles. My training consists of two hour runs from 04:00 to 06:00 AM, and then again from 08:00 to 10:00 PM. The majority of my training also involves running at an incline to stimulate the course terrain. Within one week of starting performance peptide supplementation, I noticed a significant increase in my muscle recovery. Most noticeably muscle soreness and fatigue post-exercise were significantly improved. I don’t believe that I could have continued with this training regimen and maintained my energy levels without using performance peptides.” And I was just blown away by that testimonial, but also by the fact that he’s training for a 44-mile run.

Dr. Nora: I know. Yes. And I think, yeah, whether you, you’re training at that level, which is pretty impressive. Or you’re active and you’re going for a walk or you want to be more energetic during the day and more active and maintain that strength because obviously we lose strength pretty quickly and it’s very hard to retain strength. It’s much easier to maintain muscle than it is strength, by the way. Strength is a hard one, and this is not me saying it, many publications showing over time, if someone has a breakage, for example, they break their ankle or leg or something, five years later, your strength is still not where it should be. So this super important. So what he’s saying, I totally get. I’ve gotten quite a lot of reviews as well from different people I know, when we first, before we introduced it, I sent it to quite a lot of people I knew after we launched it, same thing. And I’m constantly getting some really interesting reviews coming back similar to what Amardeep is saying.

Evelyne: That’s amazing. I want to talk about some of the other peptides like PeptiYouth and other peptides that you have in development. But before that, I want to ask you a question that I think sometimes comes up from practitioners I speak with, and one of them is actually around AI in general. When people hear the word AI, I think that some people are wary of it because it can potentially be bad, it can be wrong. And so I think when somebody hears AI discovered, what does that mean? But I want to emphasize that it’s AI discovered it’s not AI generated. And I’d love for you to speak a little more to that.

Dr. Nora: There’s a lot of talk about AI today, but ultimately it is something that’s going to be integrated to everyone’s lifestyle and it already is there. Everything we use mobiles, computers is AI integrated, but we didn’t maybe know about our talk about as much then. And I think if you just, a few things I want to say. One is that ultimately we’re talking about mathematics and computer science combined together. Ultimately that’s AI. To help scientists do their job better. That’s ultimately what we’re doing. We’re not creating new molecules from scratch. I’m sure if we could do that, but it’s not what we do. It’s not what we built for. What we are built for is that we know nature has had hundreds of millions of years to really perform and perfect a lot of its functions. And it’s like, okay, let’s use this technology. Let’s use mathematics and computer science to help us find those. Because if not, it’ll be impossible. It would be silly not to do. It would be just sitting on a mine of diamonds and not realizing it. And that’s what we’re doing today.

So I think just breaking it up, there are many uses of AI in the world and many of which potentially are not the right way to use AI. But ultimately in this case, enhancing the scientist’s capability in terms of at least accelerating that discovery of things that have been harnessed and optimized by nature, like I said, over hundreds of millions of years would be impossible without the use of this technology today. So I think I wouldn’t see it as negative at all. It’s actually pretty positive. And the way things are discovered, at the end of the day, no one really cares. The main thing is that the product actually works, right?

Evelyne: Yes.

Dr. Nora: No one really cares if at the end of the day, if the molecule was someone walking in the park and found it on the street or it was discovered through AI. But ultimately you can find very few things walking in the park and an AI does help you identify the best and why not use it.

Evelyne: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for explaining that. You mentioned PeptiYouth at one point, so I’d love to talk a little bit more about that. What is it? What does it do?

Dr. Nora: PeptiYouth is an interesting peptide. We discovered it, like I mentioned in the roots of the pea. The question then, so we have a platform within the aging area, so how humans age and what areas should we focus on? One of which was skin health in general and wrinkles. Wrinkle depth was the main measure, wrinkles and inflammation. And the goal is to identify a peptide that could reduce wrinkles by improving collagen production, elasticity production, and reducing inflammation. And this is how we discovered the peptides. We asked, like we did with PeptiStrong, we asked the technology to find a source that would have a likely peptide that would do that. And we discovered that in the roots of the pea, again, we’re not always exposed to the roots of the pea, but through AI you can. They are edible. It’s an edible part of the plant, but very few people actually eat it.

But separately, it’s interesting because we identify this peptide and then we showed how it improves even wound healing from a preclinical perspective, reduces inflammation, improves collagen and elasticity, gene expression and production. And then we went into two human clinicals. The last one I think was 150 individuals or so where we looked at different markers, mainly wrinkle depth as a major marker, so wrinkle depth and inflammation, so redness. And we identified that PeptiYouth, again, much better than any other competition peptides within the space at a much lower dose, acts on completely significantly reducing wrinkle depth, improving collagen production and reducing redness of the skin.

Evelyne: That’s incredible. And what else is in the pipeline for you? What are some of the areas of research that you’re going into next?

Dr. Nora: So I mentioned earlier the glucose area where we want to, it’s a GLP-like one agonist peptide that we’re developing that’s in clinical. And the clinical should end this year. And this one really is we’re working with the Apple wearable where we show that the goal is to reduce the peak of sugar, so you don’t have the craving, the fatigue at the end of when you had your food, et cetera. So you don’t get that craving during the day. You don’t get that fatigue during the day or the crash. And then connected directly also to weight loss. So that peptide is the clinical would be available or the results would be available by end of the year.

The other area that we’re looking at is an area within the sleep, anxiety and cognition. So we’re creating three ingredients or three peptides within that space. And again, the results of that clinical are going to be hopefully available by end of year. There has been some delays in recruitment, but ultimately these are peptides that we discovered that are anti-anxiety. Another peptide is sleep-promoting, and the goal obviously is to outcompete melatonin and other ingredients within the space. Being honest, again, melatonin doesn’t work that well on me. It works maybe the first night, but then it doesn’t really work. Because I travel quite a bit and today nothing works on me. I’m trying magnesium. That doesn’t work. I’m trying. So I’m one, I’m already telling the scientists, “Can I have some?”

So I think there’s a lot of room to create a sleep promoting peptide. And the primary on that one is sleep latency. And with that one, we combined it with a wearable that measures everything during the night when you’re asleep. So people can actually measure it if they wish to as well, and see the difference with without the ingredient, our PeptiSleep. And then one in cognition. So improved focus is one that we’re focusing on as well. There’s quite a few coming through actually, Evelyne. We have another peptide on skin that’s coming through as well. And that one is in removing black spots due to sun. And it’s interesting, the mechanism is through the PANX1 target receptor, and that one inhibits ATP movement to the extracellular part, which causes oxidation and then dark spots. And this one blocks that mechanism. And as a result, less dark spots. A really interesting mechanism. And that one is found in an algae. So all these peptides are found in different sources with very clear mechanisms. The sleep one is orexin, for example. We’re targeting the orexin target, which is no one to be connected to sleep as well.

Evelyne: This is all so cool, Nora, and I want to try them all. And I also find it fascinating. Well, melatonin, I think it works well for me. I think it works well for a lot of people. Melatonin is also found in plants, which I find fascinating and when plants produce it. And it’s interesting as you’re talking because as an herbalist, I’m looking at not physically like you are, but just I’m thinking about chamomile firstly, like the apigenin and then in ashwagandha withanolides. And so I find it so fascinating that there’s this whole other unexplored world in plants that’s not those compounds, but that’s the peptides. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing. Before we wrap up, I have a question, because you were originally in drug discovery and you’ve been researching peptides obviously to improve health. Do you think that it’s possible that the answers to diseases like cancer, maybe lie in peptides, and I’ve always thought that cancer is too multifactorial to find a single target drug, but I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.

Dr. Nora: That’s a good point you bring up, Evelyne, and that’s the approach we did for PeptiStrong. It’s a multi-targeted approach. You can’t go after very complex areas like aging, aging of the muscle, or any type of area that’s super complex with one target in mind or one solution, because very rarely your body adapts and the product doesn’t work. And so the more multifactorial approach or the more your approach is multifactorial, the better the solution. And in this case here, cancer is similar, it’s very complex area that a one-target approach is not going to solve it. Similar with the gut microbiome or understanding that gut microbiome or reversing aging, the whole longevity movement, that’s not going to be a one-target magical solution. It’s going to be a multi-targeted solution.

And yes, absolutely, there are quite a few cancer drugs in development today in different clinical phases that are peptides. So the peptides, like I said, can literally do anything. And I’m not exaggerating, it can literally do anything. It’s just that the space of peptide is so large and the different combinations is so big that we’ve only explored very little of it. And there’s so much more to explore. Unlike small molecules, which you mentioned, some of them, the space is still small and you can really do manual work to go through it. But peptide land is like in math, you call it an infinite. Infinite number of molecules. And to go through an infinite number of molecules, you need more than a human to do that.

Evelyne: So interesting to see just what happens and as a field continues to accelerate, it’ll be interesting to see in our lifetime what happens with that. Nora, I just have a few rapid fire questions for you that we ask every guest. What are your top three supplements that you personally take?

Dr. Nora: Okay, so for sure PeptiStrong. Since we were starting to develop it, sometimes when I travel and I forget it, I do notice.

Evelyne: Interesting.

Dr. Nora: That is a big one. I always take a multivitamin, but I usually only take it, I don’t take it throughout the year. There’s maybe two seasons where I’ll start it for three month cycle and then I’ll stop again for a few months and restart. And then the other one is lutein and mainly lutein for eyesight, and that’s it. So those are the main things I personally take today.

Evelyne: Nice. And what are your top health practices for your health and wellbeing?

Dr. Nora: So I think one thing is that we’re all super busy. As CEO, you’re even, it’s like nonstop. Weekends are important. So weekends are for the family, and I think that has always been an anchor for me. Weekends are super important for the family, and I think that’s from a health perspective, I think that’s crucial for me personally. Another one is dancing.

Evelyne: I love that.

Dr. Nora: Dancing, Evelyne, for sure. I think dancing is a solution to everything. Just letting yourself go, I think is a really interesting way. I am not a drinker either. I don’t drink. So I think that for me helps me because I do travel a lot and sometimes I wonder how others that do drink do it because I couldn’t. So yeah, so those are for me, the top health, obviously exercise and going for walks, all that. But those, I think three are the top ones that I know help me personally.

Evelyne: As a non-drinker. Also, I also love to dance, and I feel like we can have just as much fun.

Dr. Nora: Yes, yes. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Evelyne: And last question for you, what is something that you’ve changed your mind about through your years in this field?

Dr. Nora: So my mind, Evelyne, went on something completely different, not in this field. Because it’s a topic that I’m discussing at the moment, which is, it’s an important topic of, as COVID came in, we changed completely ways of work where everyone or most people now are working from home. And I was a big supporter of that at the beginning. Because even before COVID, I worked quite a bit from home, but I remember in the office when we were all together just before COVID, and then having to say to the office, “Okay, now bye. I don’t know when we’re going to see each other again, but one day.” But I was a very big, big supporter of that. And then I think my mind has changed quite a bit on that topic.

And it’s a topic we’re discussing at the moment simply because of the culture, the innovation part. So we are a science-based innovation company where we create constant innovations. And innovation cannot be created on a call. You can do a job on a call, you can perform really well. But actually that interaction between the different disciplines, which is the core of Nuritas, interacting with physicians, mathematicians, wet lab biologists, chemists, sales individuals, regulatory and so forth. That was the core of what Nuritas, let’s say was about. And the culture, as you work from home, many of the new people coming in don’t get the culture they used to in the office.

So that’s a topic that at the moment I’m thinking about of that kind of middle ground between working five days a week or four days a week from home to reducing that to maybe two days a week from home and the rest. So that’s on my mind, Evelyne. That’s why I bring it up. I think it’s, yeah, so that’s something that I’ve kind of changed my mind quite a bit on from completely pro to now thinking that actually it may have a longer negative effect on human health without knowing it because we are ultimately very social people.

Evelyne: It’s so interesting. I feel like it’s definitely a polarizing topic.

Dr. Nora: Yes.

Evelyne: I know recently it was in the news with Amazon announcing the return to work, and I think it depends on the kind of job that you have and how much interaction you need. And then I also think that so much of our creative thinking and all of that work happens when we’re not working-

Dr. Nora: Yes.

Evelyne: … sometimes. All of that thinking during a walk or in the shower. So it’s so dependent on the job. So thank you for sharing that.

Dr. Nora: Thanks, Evelyne. Thank you.

Evelyne: Yeah. Nora, thank you so much for this conversation today. This was absolutely fascinating. I think one of the most fascinating we’ve had on the podcast, so I’m super appreciative. Thank you so much.

Dr. Nora: Thanks, Evelyne. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Evelyne: Yeah. Thank you for tuning into Conversations for Health. Check out the show notes for resources from today’s conversation. Please share this podcast with your colleagues. Follow, rate or leave a review wherever you listen or watch. And thank you for designing a well world with us.

Voiceover: This is Conversations for Health with Evelyne Lambrecht, dedicated to engaging discussions with industry experts exploring evidence-based, cutting edge research and practical tips.


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