The Simple BioTech Podcast
The Simple BioTech Podcast
#13 - Nora Khaldi - How Nuritas is using AI to Unlock the Miraculous Benefits in the Food We Eat Every Day
Locked in every bite of food we take is a universe of hidden potential. Potential to cure disease, help our sleep, and improve our mood just to name a few. The food we eat has a galaxy of molecules we call peptides, these peptides have limitless possibilities that get destroyed by the black hole we call our digestive system. These peptides have some truly miraculous healing qualities, but because of the extreme weakness in their bioavailability, to date humans have not been able to experience the benefits.
Enter Nuritas - a company focusing on finding these miraculous peptides using AI technology, and extracting them from the food to become more bioavailable, essentially unlocking the full potential of the food that we eat. Dr. Nora khaldi is the brilliant woman behind Nuritas and today i had the pleasure of diving deep into the weeds with her while she explained just how this technology works, and what it means for human civilization going forward. So without further ado, Dr. Nora Khaldi.
Podcast notes and transcript available here: https://simplebiotechpodcast.com/nora-khaldi-nuritas
-James Ruhle, SimpleBioTechPodcast.com
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And we are back. First of all, I'd
Speaker 2:Really like to apologize to everybody
Speaker 1:For being so absent for the past few months, to be perfectly honest, running this podcast takes a lot of efforts when it comes to researching finding guests and generally preparing for each episode, it can be a lot to handle, but fear not. I have now hired an entire team to help me with the research, helped me with the editing, helped me with the intros so that I can get out episodes as quickly and consistently as possible now to celebrate our triumphant return. I have a very special guest locked in. Everybody. Food we take is a universe of hidden potential potential to cure disease, help our sleep and improve our mood. Just to name a few of the possibilities, the food we eat has a galaxy of molecules that we called peptides. These peptides have limitless possibilities that get destroyed by the black hole that we call our digestive system. These peptides have some truly miraculous healing qualities, but because of the extreme weakness in their bioavailability to dates, humans have not been able to reap the benefits, enter neuritis of company, focusing on using AI technology to find and extract these peptides from the food that we eat every single day. Dr. Nora KLD is the brilliant woman behind neuritis. And today I had the pleasure of diving deep into the weeds with her while she explained just how this technology works and what it means for human civilization going forward. It was a wonderfully interesting interview. So without further ado, Dr. Nora Caldey, the human experience is changing and it's going to happen a lot faster than you think the world is going to be a vastly different place in the next 10 to 20 years because of what's happening in the biotech industry right now, welcome to the simple biotech podcast. My name is James rule, and I am your host. The goal of the simple biotech podcast is to interview the researchers, founders, and investors that are working directly in the industry and to translate what they're working on into simple and easy to understand language. If that sounds like something you're interested in, let's get started. Hello, Dr. Nora, how are we doing today? Very
Speaker 3:Good. Very good. Happy to be here. Thank you,
Speaker 2:James. Great. You're working on some really cool stuff and I'm really excited to get into it, but we dive into what exactly you're working on and dig into some of the exciting details. I'd love to learn a little bit about you and what brought you to where you are today. You're a highly published mathematician and scientist. You've got a PhD in molecular evolution and bio informatics, as well as a master's in mathematics goes out saying that's very impressive. So I have to ask, how did that happen to be able to have world-class knowledge in both mathematics and bio-science is no easy task. What was the journey like to get you there? The
Speaker 3:Question is really interesting and it's funny when I look back because I was always attracted to life science in general, biology and scientists as a whole, they were my superheroes from a very young age. So I was always attracted to that area. So when it came to a choice, it was hard because usually mathematics and biology or life science in general are very separate entities and they shouldn't be, but I chose mathematics initially because I just find it very easy to say. So pure mathematics was my area, very theoretical computer science as well. Like I said, I was always attracted to life science and trying to understand the biology of human better. I was always attracted to health in general, and I wanted to apply mathematics computer science to that area. So I chose an area where both come together. It's called bio informatics is where you use computational tools and mathematics to try and explain nature and trying to explain biology. So that's the area of bioinformatics. I worked a lot in the area of bioinformatics in my PhD, but also we call comparative genomics and molecular evolution. And basically that's trying to understand how molecules have evolved over hundreds of millions of years and how they came to be. And, and why are we different from different species? What do we produce? What other species have evolved and how have they evolved? And I did a PhD in that area and really at the core of it, James, is that interests that fundamental interest in health, in biology as a whole in trying to understand nature better. Cause I think as humans, we haven't really tapped into nature that much. That's
Speaker 2:A great answer. And it's really cool that from a very young age, you had that type of interest. That's awesome. So you're working on a company now called neuritis based out of Dublin Ireland. I think I have a pretty good understanding of what it is that you guys are working on. So let me see if I can explain it in my own words and you can correct me where I'm wrong. How does that sound perfect? So neurotox is a company that has essentially a massive database of compounds and how they affect the human body. You've also got a database of foods like fruits and vegetables that also include these compounds. Neuritis is using AI to explore these compounds in particular, the peptides and turning them into supplements for nutrition and longevity summary.
Speaker 3:A good start to good summary, James, I take it just a little bit, maybe a little bit back. So I find a narrow task to really answer a very, very big question. And when you look really around us, there's a lot of trends are occurring. One is there's a huge aging population that's growing significantly on the other hand. And this is really that's probably has significantly changed over the past few years is the way consumers perceive food and health and well-being and nutrition of how they eat and how they consume that has significantly changed from my grandparents and my parents and myself to our kids. We all view it very, very differently. And that kind of understanding from the metal, understanding that what you eat and what you consume every day actually influences your health significantly. And there's a lot of research coming in supporting that and realization. So consumers have significantly changed in the way they perceive consumed products in general beverages, food supplements, skincare products, and so forth. And then on the other side, James, you have this whole global epidemics that are just, you know, increasing everywhere. So you have, uh, diabetes, pre-diabetes blood pressure, cardiovascular issues, and it seems that food is becoming the issue, but it's not, it should be the solution to a lot of this. And if you look at it, basically we have augumented our lifespan. So we live a lot longer now than we did before, but our health span has really stayed the same relatively. So we're not living longer healthier. We're actually living longer and being sick for longer. And a lot of the diseases can be prevented. And if you look at the whole health system, the health system is broken, totally broken. You can't sustain a system where people get sick for many, many years, it's too expensive. It's not good. Neither for people that are sick for most of their life for a third of their life, or sometimes a little less, but around that, that's too much to sustain and just saves looking at some statistics coming out of India. They were saying that just India itself, if it were to tackle diabetes and just pay for Metformin to tackle diabetes in India, we'll use all that healthcare funding. The whole health care funding would just go on Metformin to tackle diabetes. So that system is on sustainable worldwide. So there needs to be a way to prevent disease and augment our health span. And that only comes through the things we do every day. And that is what we eat, what we consume. It's not going to be from a drug-like perspective when you get sick of us today really is during your life time, when do you consume what you eat, what you put on your skin, would you take a supplements to increase your health span and to be healthier for longer so that you could do when you're 30, when you're 60 or 70 years so forth, and that is doable. But the issue is that there aren't current solutions that are scientifically proven to do that. So you have your pharma that has a lot of science, but that comes when you get sick and beforehand you just, you know, you go on the web and you try and find something and you're trying to decipher, what's healthy. What's unhealthy. You go into shops and you're hit with loads of different products. And you're like, what should I take here? What nerd test kit comes to solve is how do we create scientifically proven product lines that can actually improve human health and actually augment your health span so that you stay healthier for longer? How can we bring true science of pharma, like science to the area of nutrition. And that is a big challenge because it's totally breaking up the system. So if you look at the food industry, for example, or the supplement industry, they were not designed for this, the food industry was designed for tastes and price. The question is how can we create ingredients that are going to allow these companies to create healthier products, products that are not only going to taste good, but have a really good health specific to the person that can, for example, improve their metabolism or improve their muscle regeneration so that you maintain your muscle for longer improve their gut microbiome, improve your immune system and so forth. And, and I think the question is how would you create these ingredients that have scientific rigor and clinical proof to a point where they're, you know, they have the same science proof and rigorous pharma, but they're not pharma. There are still food grade and can be introduced in the different foods we're eating and how can we bring that rigor to this area and how can we allow people to live healthier and longer and take control of their own health. And that's really the premise of how neurotox came about. So narrow task is capable of interrogating nature, specifically foods for components in food that we're losing when we eat the food. So very often, James, if you eat an Apple or a banana or, you know, character's spinach, or you get a lot of nutritional benefits, but a lot of the health benefits associated with that plant, you actually lose when you digest it, they're not bioavailable. You don't get them. So what neurotox has found is that there are ways you can make them more available to people. So first is the discovery. So we discover these ingredients in different plants and we chose plants because they are sustainable because as they are healthy, sustainable, but there's a lot in them that we don't actually use. And we're not using plants in their full potential, so neuro task. And that was the discovery of those molecules that have been hidden in the plant for, you know, hundreds of millions of years and making them available to humans so that we can get the full benefit, the health benefit that were otherwise missing. So in a nutshell, we interrogate nature. We use machine learning, artificial intelligence to do that. The funny thing as well, James is that if you look at the ingredients that we're currently using as humans, whether those are in our face cream or foods, beverages are supplements, et cetera, like the vitamins, the minerals, the omegas, et cetera. These are ingredients that have been discovered 30 years ago, a hundred years ago, between 30 and a hundred years where they're very old ingredients. And we haven't really discovered many after that. And the reason because it takes a hundred years, 3,000 years to get something from a discovery to market, it's very, very expensive. It's ad hoc. The question is what, how can we accelerate the discovery? How can we create more ingredients? Because nature is full of them. They just full of health benefits that we haven't tapped into. So how can we accelerate that cycle of discovery and bringing it to market? And that's what neurotox is bringing. So identifying deciphering what's in nature, identifying the real true health potentials that are going to augment our health span and bringing those to consumers in a fast effective with a pharma, like type science proof behind
Speaker 2:Us. So you've already answered a few of the questions I had planned and nice response you gave there. But, uh, I do, I'm kind of curious. So how do you make these ingredients more bioavailable in general, if they're not bioavailable when you're eating? Yes.
Speaker 3:So we went after specific molecules. So initially James, before we S I set up narrow task, I sat down and tried to understand the industry because I came into it from a data perspective and mathematical perspective saying, okay, well, the reasons why humans have not discovered more active, natural ingredients that really transform human health, I can be proven scientifically is that it takes 30 to a hundred years. It's very expensive. It's ad hoc. None of them have been discovered based on a consumer demand. Usually you're just randomly discover something in the lab and hope that the functionality will have an effect in the future. And you're hoping that, so then what we do is that as neurotox tasks we decided to, before I set up neurotox I spoke to a lot of companies and said, okay, if there was the perfect ingredient, what would a perfect ingredient look like? Cause you want a lot of companies to use it in their formulations and their products. Now obviously tastes comes up, cost comes up. Those are the main factors of drives food production in general and food formulation. So those aside, those are important factors that need to be put into any ingredient discovery, but what other factors and the other factors are, it has to be sustainable. Sustainability now is a big, big thing. It has to be scientifically proven. So real proof, not waffle, not marketing, but real clinical proof that shows that this ingredient actually has an effect. And the effect is a measurable effect. Also that the ingredient is the ingredient is already available. That means that you, you can show that when you eat the ingredients already, that it has an effect that it doesn't disappear because you break it down in your digestive system. But also that the ingredients sustain baking, because baking are heat, heat processing in general, in the industry kills a lot of activities. So a lot of the actives are used that tell you, this is in rich with vitamins or whatever, but a lot of those actually die within the processing of food. The question is, how can you create an ingredient that actually sustains and resist that processing? And many other factors, more specifically factors like the ingredient piece would address a clear consumer trends. None of the ingredients that exist on earth that we are using have been discovered with a key consumer demand. They have been discovered ad hoc and retrofitted to consumer demands, which is crazy. So being able to tailor, make an ingredient to a consumer demand, whether that is, I want to see better. I want a better immune system. I want to feel better. My mood is down and I want to, I want to feel more energetic and, and so forth, or I want to live longer. And I want, you know, my muscle to stay healthier for longer or better metabolism. So those specific trends are current. They're not old trends or current trends. None of the ingredients have been discovered for that. So the wishlist of how an ingredient should look like letters to the fact that our type of ingredients should be a peptide and a plant peptide specifically, no plant pep. What a plant peptides, a peptide is simply a short protein. So you've heard of proteins. Everyone knows what a protein is. They're everywhere. You can buy bars, enriched protein. And it's funny the story of proteins because it started off in sports nutrition, more specifically, whole muscle area. And then it grew into a bigger than that. And now everyone's thinking protein or pet bites are short proteins. And the difference between that short protein and the protein. So a peptide in a protein is that proteins carry nutritional benefits. They're nutrients, which is great. And peptides are nutrients too. So they carry nutrition, but peptides on like proteins carry very specific health benefits that proteins don't. So they can modulate inflammation. They can modulate certain pathways in the human body to help you speak better, to help you stress less, to help you age slower and so forth. It's literally the language of communication of the human body. Our human body internee communicates via peptides. So it's the natural way we communicate. We don't communicate via phytonutrients or small molecules. That's not our language of communication, our language of communications, our peptides. So the whole choice of what type of ingredients were we going to focus on with our technology came down to peptides and compact buys because not only are they nutrients like proteins and regulatory friendly, but they also carry specific health benefits. And they are the language of communication of any species, especially humans. So they are the natural modulators of how we are built and how we feel and so forth. But the issue when I first started was everyone was telling me, you know, what peptides, you know, are not stable. They get broken down really easily. They're not bioavailable and so forth. And it's funny coming from a mathematical perspective in this area, I realized that a lot of the scientists were focused on a very small set of peptides called hormones and hormones are made by nature to signal very quickly and to die. Okay? So your body gets rid of them really quickly. These are peptides like incident as a peptide. So hormones obviously are made by nature and how they evolve to have short lives. So they don't stay that long. They're not already available, but I realized that the peptides there's a bigger space of PEPSO is, is the biggest space known to humankind. It's actually bigger than all planets and non songs in the universe. It's a very massive number of peptides that exists around us. And we've only tapped the cheap, nothing in that space, very small numbers. And the question is how would we identify peptides that not only are efficacious, but also already available and stable and all the different points you want them to behave like, and that's what neurotox has brought together. And that's why we're using machine learning, artificial intelligence. It's really to dig into this very large amount of data and be able to identify the right peptides that not only are efficacious, but are also going to resist digestion and be Barney available so that they can perform. And then you can break them down into nutrients after they perform and so forth, and that they can be heat stable so that they can be baked. And the activity that has benefits still remains. All those now are possible through machine learning. There was no other way of doing this through usual wet lab experiments. You couldn't stack all that data together to find the right ingredients. That's how we came to the fact that the type of ingredients we needed actually plant peptides. And the question then was what, how can we not only find efficacy would integrate other areas of our important for food production. And we focused on that and we built the technology that now can decipher nature, understand what's the potentials are a hidden each plant, starting with foods that we're not getting as humans. And how can we make those available so that we extend our health span.
Speaker 2:That's a fantastic answer. And like I said, I think you basically wiped out 30% of my questions here, from what I'm understanding, the reason why you chose peptides is, I mean, the simple answer is, I mean, peptides versus proteins versus any other type of compound is because it's just, I mean, the use cases are in a way kind of limitless.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And also I think the major thing that people forget is that peptides are the major signaling molecule in the human body. They are the language of nature when our cells interact together, a lot of the interactions are via peptides when our microbiome interacts with us and talk us with VFX dies. And even when it's proteins, it's the short parts of the proteins that are acting. And I think what's interesting as well, is that the types of peptides we're going after the reason we're not getting them when we eat the plants, they're embedded within the protein. So, you know, the protein is like a sentence. The peptide is a word. And what you're doing is that you're trying to decipher the sentence, to understand the sentence, the protein in the plants, trying to find that Woodward that's going to be relevant and breaking it out of the sentence. So that's how we make peptides. The funny things that when you think about it, you have these plants for example, or are these sources with different proteins within them. And these proteins have many hidden secrets or hidden peptides within the protein, but within the protein, they're not expressed, they don't act, these peptides are silent, then you eat and just break it down randomly. And, and you don't get that benefit of the peptide. And what we're doing is that we're looking at those proteins and we're identifying within those proteins, the peptide. So the word that's important to communicate with the human, we break it out of the protein. And when the peptide comes out of the protein, it expresses itself, it becomes its own entity. And it has a clear health benefits. And this is how we're literally changing something dormant or inactive or dead, let's say into something active that can modulate very specific health benefits that we're, that consumers are looking
Speaker 2:For. Okay. That's fascinating. So let me ask you a question.[inaudible] is you guys are launching supplements instead of going, you know, the drug route does going after supplements and taking things orally restrict you at all, because some of these types of peptides are maybe not going to be very bioavailable. You know, I'm aware of certain peptides that are injectable. So I'm kind of curious why you went down the route of supplements when maybe potentially there's more options if you go down the drug route. Yeah. So
Speaker 3:It's not about supplements. Okay. For us, it's about prevention. So we're focused on creating ingredients that are going to be incorporated into multiple different areas. That's food in general. So functional food and medical foods are food in general dietary supplements, for sure personal care, anything that consumers use during their whole life. And we didn't, we clearly did not go down the drug route because if the technology could go there, absolutely, we have already counted. It's moving forward there. But we know that the pharma has its own area, which is when you get sick, you take something we want to focus on before you get sick. Cause that's the major part, like how do you extend your health span? So let's focus on everyone and this allow people to not get sick for as long as possible. There's a massive market. There, there is absolutely a massive market that is totally on top. It's in dire need for true science. And that's what we're bringing. So it's not about just dietary supplements. It literally is about allowing the creation of these active ingredients and then adding those active ingredients to various products in terms of tackling bioavailability, et cetera, in the consumer space prior pharma, it has to be already available. You cannot inject. So you can't, food is not going to be injected or dietary supplements. So it has to be already available. So that's one of the criteria we have when we're selecting our ingredients. If the ingredient can only be injected, we won't go down that road. We really are looking for ones that are, and we always find because nature is full of ingredients just when you only got the surface of what's out there. You're trying to find peptides that do everything that are beneficial, that are already available and so forth, but are natural and food grade. And the interesting part is love James is that we don't modify the peptides. So, and that's very important because when aging, for example, aging is a very complex diseases. I'd say it's a very complex area and you can't tackle it by one targets. You're not going to tackle aging by going after one target like pharma dues, you have to go after tennis. Basically there's many different pathways that are shifting from healthier state to unhealthier are aging States where things are not working as well. And what you're trying to do is holistically go after multiple targets to kind of shift it back from an unhealthy state to a healthier state or younger stage. And that's exactly how nutrition works. Nutrition works. Head is sticky. It's not a Bay going after one target and hammering that target. And then everything else is screwed over. It literally is about holistically shifting and pressing the right buttons and moving a system from a current system to a younger system. And a lot of what we're doing, I'll give you an example. One is in the muscle area. So muscle is a very big, I think on top of the area, but it's, it's a massive area and people are more and more aware of their muscle. It's a major organ in the body. It's the heart of the metabolic heart. It's really responsible for a lot of our metabolism. As we age muscle degrades and its capability to metabolize as well, energy production degrades. So our energy, we feel less energetic. Our metabolism goes down. We increase a lot inside before we see it outside, then all the sagging as well. So it's physical. The first really signs of aging, all of a sudden this really muscle decaying, the cells themselves become older as well. And they don't, like I said, they don't metabolize that well, there's more inflammation and exercise is good, but it's not the only solution because the cells age, in any case. And the question is, how do we make the cell age less or slower? How do we shift it from its state of aging to a healthier younger state? Because it's again the major organ for mobility and you don't want to lose it. You want to maintain your muscle for as long as possible. Cause it'd be directly links to your overall health. It's an area that's growing scenario where consumers are more aware and currently there are no solutions, okay? They tell you eat protein and exercise, but protein are nutrients. It's like putting fuel in an engine of a car and the engine is broken. You really need to fix the engine. So the question for us, what, how can we fix the engine? How can we fix the muscle cell from an older cell to a younger cell? How do we move it and shift it? And we found three peptides that do three different things, inflammation, muscle synthesis, and reducing muscle degradation went after three pathways that underlying muscle health in general. And we found three peppers in fava bean. Now, if you eat the fava bean, you don't get that benefit. That helps specific benefits. You get the nutritional part without the health benefit. We were able to find those in fava bean and unlock them from the protein. So release them. And we there's no modification here. You literally are eating still the fava bean as a whole, but now there's a new activity that has appeared because we discovered it and we made it available to consumers. So you couldn't get more natural. You couldn't get more sustainable with a clear scientific clinical proof that this product as consumed by humans, regenerates your muscle and you have it for longer. The product itself has an ingredient. We're a B2B company. Our intention with a lot of our ingredients is to partner with large companies, medium size companies. Get that ingredient within their products, targeting certain areas from obviously early, as early as the age of 30, because we start losing Muslim from the age of 28, all the way through life and to maintain it for longer, we launched also a product. This is just a proof of concept product. And, and just for a short period, limited time, only with our peptide within it's called L or stores based in the U S and it's the one for muscle. And we've seen a huge adoption, even though we only put it for a limited time, because we're not a DTC company where B2B, there has been a lot of uptake of the product and consumers are resonating with it because they're more aware of their muscles. So it's a more holistic, but still scientific because you're bringing all the clinical data, you're bringing all the science, you know, exactly your peptides, what they're doing, how they're doing is you also, and you're marrying it to nature. The best of nature. These things are, like I said, they're sustainable. They're plant base. They're whole foods. We're not extracting. It's not about extracting and making something totally different from the natural source. It literally is just about unleashing those benefits from nature that have been there. That's just, we haven't discovered them.
Speaker 2:So basically you're focusing on prevention, using stuff that's been there for millennia and yeah. Okay. I think I'm starting to wrap my mind around it. And I didn't, I guess I just, now I'm realizing you guys are a B2B company, so you don't actually sell your supplement necessarily to customers. You are selling the ingredient to supplement makers. So
Speaker 3:If I give you an example, you know, the Intel insight and example, this is a very good example because you know, it's a complex technology chip that allows the computer to work. And that just the concept, okay. Whether Intel or other, our neuro test is creating as the neurotox inside. So these are the technology that's able to. In this case, it's an ingredient. It's a natural based ingredient with a lot of science behind, that's going to fuel all the products of the future. Those are foods are beverages, again, dietary supplements, et cetera. So we are a B2B company. However, we, with Eddie restore, we are testing direct to consumer as well. And looking at the core of it neurotox is a B2B. So we invent these ingredients. We spend a lot of time and a lot of work developing them and putting all the signs and clinicals in place and understanding them and scaling them and producing them. And then we partner with large companies, medium companies as well, putting those ingredients within. And we've just that she started launching ingredients the past few months. It took quite a few years to develop them because you have to do quite a lot of clinicals. First, you have to discover them, produce them, make sure you can produce them because sometimes, you know, it's hard to, it's not sustainable. It's not cost-effective. So we thought taking forward a few, um, we have one called pep to youth. It's in the aging arena, focused on skin at this time, but we have an oral version as well. And we did a clinical on skin looking at skin wrinkles, for example, as, as an aging marker and the depth of that wrinkle based on, uh, what we call a double blind placebo clinical, where we get placebo and our cream with the peptide within the peptide is from P P uh, the vegetable, the results are phenomenal. You know, the results in a few days, you know, or a few weeks, the results are extremely phenomenal in terms of reduction of, of skin, wrinkle, depth, and production of certain proteins like collagen and so forth, which are hard to produce. And then we have another one, which is the muscle one. This one is very big, does huge demand on this one because globally there's a clear need for those types of ingredients that modulate the muscle and fix the issue as opposed to just feeding it. That's the five, I be one. And then we have another one that's more medical or medical foods is still in the prevention arena. It's for pre-diabetes are diabetics too. It's an ingredient from P as well. It's a totally different Pepperdine network. And on that one, we've don't clinicals to show that it significantly reduces glycated and mobile bedroom, which is the major market glucose in individuals over time. So again, it's to prevent people that have high sugar levels to turn into diabetics, because it's very hard to return from being diabetic. It's there are so many, and now with measuring tools, there's a lot of measurability now and apps and so forth. A lot of wearables are going to become very good measuring devices and people are going to be more aware of their glucose. Now they're not so much, but they are going to become more and more aware and being able to go and get something that truly helps you not become diabetic is very important. So some of the products we're working on, other ones in sleep, or the ones in gut health in general, immune modulation this quite a few coming through in the funnel as well.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. And how can somebody get a hold of some of these supplements? Is there a way to connect with some companies you're working with to purchase these? I mean, it's pretty exciting stuff. So I'm sure a lot of people here, you know. Yeah, yeah. So
Speaker 3:A lot of the launches are going to be end of this year, beginning of next year, and we would have them on the website. So do subscribe to our newsletter@neurotoxoraddyourlife.com does a newsletter there too. So as companies start to launch them and we have pepped youth already, quite a lot of companies are formulating it for launches next year. Cause it does take time between giving an ingredient to a company and them taking it to market because they have to formulate it and create a product and add it to their own product. And then we have from the food part, Pepsi, Sean would be the first one to hit the market in a few different products, followed by Pepsi force, which is a diabetes product. There's another one in the inflammation arena. So it's an with incredible results. Like the clinical shows, you know, reduction of inflammation and individuals that have seen it. So circulating information, but also better strength as a result. So people get stronger, which is very important because obviously as you age again, from the age of 28, this is not like, you know, you don't have to be 60, the starts of any you're young, your information increases with age and there are consequences. Long-term consequences and strength is one of them. So we lose strength as we age. There's a big drop, I think at the age of 40 as well, I want to 31 to 40 and it keeps continuing. And in this one, the trial we showed was a reduction in inflammation and then a strength implementation and people that have seen that inflammation reduction, which is interesting. And then separately, we, like I said, we have a limited edition where we launched to EDU your stores, the product, and the website is EDU life.com. And we are going to try and a few products with our ingredients within to understand consumers and understanding how to position the science better, because obviously you want to communicate our science better and we want it to be consumer friendly. So we want as much feedback from individuals as possible. What we do is complex and we want to make it simple. But what we do also works and has true science behind. And it's an area where, you know, there's very little science or are there's nothing. So the first product, like I said, at your stores with pet to strong the muscle product, but we are intending to try and other ingredients we have is, yeah,
Speaker 2:That's really exciting. And I know I'm going to be for sure subscribing to that. You know, I just turned 32 years old and I'm already starting to notice symptoms of inflammation, like crazy. My strength, you know, I'm definitely not as strong as I used to be, not as effective in the gym as I used to be. So I get smarter, I get better at working out. I understand things better, but it's just, the athleticism is not there anymore. And so this is all kind of, you know, it would be a dream come true to be able to somehow restore some of that from my twenties.
Speaker 3:Funny, James, you're saying that because I think that's the problem with us all. Okay. We look at ourselves in the mirror and the aging we noticed is on our faces. Okay. That's the first part you're focused on the outside. So face, you know, maybe body as well, but you're focused on the outside, but the outside usually happens a lot later than the insight. The aging starts inside a lot earlier and no one knows you don't know what's happening and it creeps up very quickly. And then it starts coming out to the outside. And that realization, I think will come to consumers fast, where consumers are going to be more aware of that aging starts inside very early on. And it's not just about the beauty of, of your face, but it's inside. Like I said, the muscle sagging area, when you start seeing the kiss, your face sagging or whatever area soggy that's has started years and years back. And then I think with the wearables and the technologies that are now available, and that's really exciting that area. And that's why actually one of the differentiators we're bringing to the market. Well as that, everything we invent in mind with a clear, measurable tool. So we don't invent the measurable tool, but we're looking at the market to see what measurable tools or what measurability tools are. Diagnostic tools in general. So wearables and DNA testing and kits for gut microbiome testing and so forth. What areas where our ingredients could be measured, because we want obviously people to understand that some of the ingredients we're developing are going to work a lot from the insight. It's not always the outside and, but you want to see a result. Okay. So from very early on, as we're developing our ingredients, we're always thinking about, okay, how can we be measured? Because measurability tools are going to come through and be readily available. And that, I think we do two things. We'll separate the noise from the true science, but it will also allow individuals to measure things that haven't are aging within with the insight that they couldn't do before. That part is really
Speaker 2:Exciting. Okay. So I think we have a pretty good idea of neurotox and what you guys are trying to accomplish, how everything kind of works and, and all of that. I want to touch briefly. Cause I am curious about how you guys go about the process of finding this peptide that you're going for. I mean, this is already going on for about 45 minutes, so I don't want to take up too much of your time, but if you can briefly just discuss how you guys find the peptide, test it and then take it to market. What's that process.
Speaker 3:Yeah. In a very simplistic view, we always start with the consumer area. So we always start with the consumer need that literally James is totally disrupting the whole area of ingredients development, because so far, like I said, at the beginning, every ingredient that we currently consume, whatever that ingredient is, has been developed ad hoc, it has not been developed with a consumer in mind. This is the first time where we have totally disrupted the area. And we start with a clear consumer demand. That can be anything that can be as general as I want to sleep better. I want to improve my gut health. I want to reduce this inflammation, or it can be very specific to a specific marker like aisle 17. And I won't go into too much science here. Let's focus on a consumer needs that consumer need that is translated into biological functions. So for example, with the muscle area, we knew that muscle decay was a result of mainly three things coming together, inflammation, muscle degradation, and muscle synthesis. So three things that were going down or up to, depending on the area you're in. So that's translation into biological question. And then we have a technology that we've built called empathy, which stands for neuro task peptide finder. It takes that biological understanding of the consumer need. And it starts trying to understand what type of peptide, what type of molecule in a plant or any source could modulate those areas. And I won't go into the details there, but we've built that system over the past five and a half years when we've added a lot of data around the world, we've produced a lot of internal data to get to that result. So once it knows, okay, well, this is the type of, of molecule that would work. Then it goes out to nature and it starts going through all the proteins in nature, trying to find the words that look alike, the word you're looking for. So the peptides that look alike, the peptides you're looking for, and then once it identifies it, it tells us how to actually unlock it from that food source. So we tell us it's in front of being, and you will need this enzyme or this enzyme, the enzymes are simply proteins. That cost another protein. So you break the protein and you release the peptides and that's how you get your powder. So imagine if I had to translate this into something that anyone can understand, it's like looking for a human, you have a face, but you don't have the full face. You're looking for an individual among billions. You don't know exactly all the characteristics of the person, but you do know some characteristics, you know, they're tall. You know that they're have dark hair. You know that they're overweight, let's say this and this. They have a spot on their face. You have some characteristics. That's what the AI is capable of doing. And then it goes off and you're looking for that person with those motifs among bins. And once you identify it, the question is, well, how do I make it available? Once you identify the peptide, how do you make it available from the source? And you're sending an enzymes to cos we then make the sample in a natural way to food process weights, not most natural way of making a, an ingredient. And the example I always give in that is like milk versus fermented milk or milk versus kefir, you know, milk. You can get nutritional benefits from it, but the true health benefits you would get from milk or from the fermented version, the difference between fermentation of milk and the milk is that you're breaking down a lot of the molecules like proteins into peptides and the peptides appear with those two health benefits. And that's really what we're doing. We're taking source materials, we're identifying those hidden health benefits and we're breaking them up to make them available. We use third parties to scale the ingredients. They're like powders. It's simple, like a powder you'd buy. And, um, that's how we make a James
Speaker 2:Pretty cool to learn how that all works. It's pretty fascinating. I'm, you know, I'm a businessman myself. And so I just enjoy hearing about what this whole, you know, the whole process of it. It's just, it's super interesting to hear that the operational end of it, speaking of business, I'd love to ask you a few questions about neuritis. If you don't mind, Neri toss, I'm sorry. So I saw the company has been described as having the exceedingly rare potential to become bigger than Facebook. Now, obviously that's quite the claim. So could you expand exactly on what that means and how that could happen? So
Speaker 3:Our goal, our mission is to improve the lives of billions of people. Okay. That has been my mission as a person before, as an academic, but also from their task perspective, we want to be in every home by 2030, okay. Inside our foods, inside our beverages, really extending human and empowering humans to stay healthier for longer so that they don't get sick. So as such, I think that comparison also was made. So as we launch ingredients, and these are, you know, unique ingredients that are fully patented, like pharma, we own the ingredient as a business. Facebook may or may not be the right. The right comparison of Facebook basically has touched a lot of people, probably good or bad. Okay. But our side that we want to touch us as many people as possible. You know, we want to, and like I said, extend and help individuals around the world allow them to do what they were doing when they were a lot younger,
Speaker 2:Being able to help every single person on the planet would, would probably put you on the level of Facebook without a doubt. So where do you see neurotox in five, 10, 15 years, you mentioned 20, 30. You want to be in every home you got about nine years for that to happen. What would, uh, so nine years you guys must be pretty far along at this point.
Speaker 3:Good. Yeah. We have quite a lot of we're working with a lot of companies already international, internationally like Nestle Mars, Sumitomo BSF. So quite a lot of companies that we're working with already and co-developing ingredients with them that are separate to the ones we own fully. And then with the ones we own fully, we have quite a lot of companies now lined up to start launching. It takes a while. It's funny, a biotech is interesting and in terms of it does take awhile to develop a lot of IP. And then once you start launching it, that's when you see that immense growth and we've started doing that. We've already grown significantly via the partnerships. We're on the good trajectory to be there. The only way to be in every home by 2030s, really, to use partners, to get that kind of reach. Because as a company, you have to build a massive sales team to get into every home by 2030, but using our partners and their scaling capabilities in terms of reach a consumer reach, that's how we're going to get there. And the funny thing, James is that consumers have lost faith in a lot of food companies and for the right reasons, they've reduced faith. They've lost faith in a lot of, in the whole dietary supplement area because it's full of marketing and just hype there's time for big, big change companies know that they absolutely know them. They know that consumers now are more knowledge-based consumers. You know, you can't just wave marketing at them. That's going to move very fast to, uh, show me the data because of all, again, all the apps and all the technologies are available to decipher that information. So I think we're on a really good trajectory, allowing a lot of these companies to gain traction because of, of that, allowing them to create better products, truly better products.
Speaker 2:That's great. And, and are you guys, are you guys raising money at the moment you have plans to go public? I'm sure a lot of people here probably pretty frothy hearing about this. So they'd love to hear more about that.
Speaker 3:We're going to close around this year. Is it going to be our last round? We are seeing it probably that way. This is to scale up some of the areas we're in and yeah, our intentions in terms of, I can't share anything about IPO, et cetera, but w we are looking at different ways. IP was probably a big one on it as well, but at the moment, we're really, really only focused on getting the ingredients as many companies as possible and moving some of the earlier ingredients that haven't gone through clinical, through clinical as well. Some of them like the three I showed you are talk to you about have gone through their clinicals, but other ones aren't behind. So we need to move those forward. And, um, to really focus on growing the business and the commercial team. And then, uh, there's the folks that also, uh, after that we'll look at IPO's and other things
Speaker 2:Got it. And you mentioned your website before in terms of staying up to date on the product, but if someone wanted to get in contact potentially, maybe participating in the round, or just basically staying up to date with you guys from a financial perspective, where could they do that? So there's
Speaker 3:Two things. Okay. I would subscribe to the newsletter on neurotox and the other one is on Eddy. Your lifestyle comes to this student newsletters there that you definitely subscribe to. And then if you want to contact the companies that info@neurotox.com, um, if there's interest in, in understanding and more maybe the, from an investment perspective or are other areas like specifically, um, the products themselves or the info@neurotox.com would be the best way.
Speaker 2:So I love to end every interview with just a few fun questions to kind of balance thing off bounce things off from the science, hardcore science we've been talking about. Yeah. Let me just throw some at you and see what you think you're working on a lot of different products here. Do you think it'd be possible to make a single systemic anti-aging peptide supplement? I think you'd
Speaker 3:Need quite a few. So let's say an hour range you're talking. So anti-inflammation is at the core of a lot of what we're doing. So you need an anti-inflammatory makes with, and not just any, it has to be really, um, it has to only work when you do have information on not work when you don't want, because not everyone has inflammation. It has to be make mixture it's again, aging is a super complex disease. And if you look at all the areas we're in, it's all aging, but at different aspects, metabolism is one side, which is glucose metabolism. The other side is muscle, just totally different, but all those are aging processes. Separately. You have inflammation. We augment that with age. You have, um, good microbiome, significant changes as we age the gut microbiome changes as well. So, and other things as well. So the question is kind of a cocktail of those. Yes. Okay. But having just one supplement from one source with one, uh, kind of a drug to reverse your aging, that is, uh, I don't believe in that at all. It has to be a holistic, probably targeting different angles
Speaker 2:Of aging. We're not at a point where we've got the limitless drug. We're not, uh, no, no, no. Aging
Speaker 3:Is a very complex, it's not a one target approach. It's not that easy. It's a very complex area. And that's why a lot of the work that has been done in, in general has been done only in mice and has not translated in human yet because it's totally, and we're all different, you know, mice and humans are so filthy different. So to tackle aging, you really need to tackle different aspects. And that's why we went after certain aspects of metabolism, muscle inflammation, sleep, gut microbiome, those all are tackling aging at the heart of it, you know, because those chronic diseases and those in general are related to aging.
Speaker 2:Sure. And neurotox is always looking at active peptides in food. I'm curious, what was the most promising, maybe surprising, active peptide, rich plant that you've used in your research? Are there any that you're particularly excited about and what has the highest treatment slash life-changing potential? Each
Speaker 3:Plant is totally different. It does no particular plant that jumps side. What's interesting is that my career, I first started working in milk when I started going into nutrition after, cause I worked in drug discovery as well, but into nutritional work, I started working on milk, human milk. I was blown away by what was hidden in human milk. And I think we're only, again, we're only understanding the tippy top of the iceberg there in terms of what are the potentials within human milk want to be male? Cause another one is crazy, but marsupial milk is very interesting and marsupial milk. You can literally alter the development of the marsupial with the type of milk you get them. So whether it's brain development versus got development versus muscle development, it's incredible. And so far, we're only understanding that it's the molecules within the milk that actually are shifting or are signaling and altering the developments. And I think that probably those two are probably the most bioactive I've seen, however, plants have a lot and we have not tapped into plants at all compared to even milk. So we're discovering more and more and more and, um, Hmm. Or Superbowl
Speaker 2:Milka I never would've guessed that. Yeah. Yeah. Mindblower
Speaker 3:James, you should look into it. It's the reason I'm actually in this area, you know, area where I'm like, Oh my God, you can literally change the development of a Wallaby depending on the type of milk you give them early milk versus later melt the same while at the same while it'd be milk, the composition changes and it changes to develop different parts of the Wallaby. And that tells you all, you need to know about molecular composition of nature and how we could target and modulate and shift and peptides are the major modulators, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:Okay. So for the final question, I always like to ask my guests, what outside of neuritis are you personally super excited about in the world of longevity and biotech?
Speaker 3:I think, like I said, measurability, so tools that can diagnose from a technology perspective. So more on the wearables are patches that you can just monitor again on your phone, different signals within the body. I think that area has come a long way and it's going to grow significantly. And together with that, there are currently no solutions that can marry with that case. So for example, James, you can put on a monitor and discovered measuring two and find that one of your inflammatory markers, you know, aisle six or aisle 17 or whatever is high. What can you do? Nothing. There are Cuttino solutions. You have to get sick to take a drug. So you're not going to take drugs while you're healthy. So creating ingredients that can really marry with technology as it advances is really the future. And these technologies come a long way, but they only tell you the problem. They can't find the solution. And that's what we're providing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd agree. The wearables market will be very exciting. You know, I know that me personally, I'd love to get my hands on a consistent blood glucose monitor, but I think you need a prescription in the States. So yeah, once stuff like that becomes more available and you're able to track things like inflammation, you know, you can get notifications, whatever, being able to adjust your diet accordingly, knowing, figuring out what's activating that type of stuff. That is really exciting industry. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Dr. Nora, well, this was a super insightful and I really enjoyed this conversation and I think a lot of people are going to enjoy it. It's really exciting to hear what is on what we have in store for the future. And, uh, I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with neuritis and seeing what you guys accomplish. Absolutely. Thanks for meeting James.
Speaker 1:If you got this far, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. If this was all interesting to you, I'd love to connect on Instagram and hear your feedback. I'll also be posting clips from the latest episodes as well as anything else. I find interesting about the biotech industry. You can find me on Instagram at simple biotech. And if you're interested in the companies that I'm looking at and the companies that I'm excited about, connect with me on angel list at angel.co/james rule. That's James R U H L E. Thank you so much and be safe out there.