Investigating The Billion-Dollar Peptide Industry

You know the film Limitless? Do you think there's a point at which you can, like, design an ingredient that does genuinely make your brain far more powerful?

This is where chemistry and physics come together to explain biology using the language of mathematics.

This ingredient started its life on a computer screen and ended its life, you know, in a human clinical study with people actually seeing changes on their wearable devices.

How much do these machines cost? One pill and you take it, everything changes. That is what's happening here. Let's not brush it over. Come on. So we're here in Dublin. Ironically, I'm drinking a coffee because I couldn't actually find one of these in the shop. Obviously here with the RTD, we don't have these in retail yet. We're here with George, our MPD manager, and Louis behind the camera. We're visiting Neuritas, which is— how do I describe it, George? It's, I guess it's like a mental biotechnology company with some crazy ingredients. It's the first time we've actually Personally met like an ingredient supplier directly. We met these guys at Vita Foods in Barcelona two months ago. Yeah, we're going to show you inside. There's a peptide ingredient today that we're going to be talking about. Just feels like the whole functional coffee, tea, everything space has gone mental the past few years. Yeah, it's got super, super competitive, and then it's like, what are you actually competing on? Is it like brand? Is it ingredient? Because basically everyone does the same shit. I do think in supplements and Functional stuff is probably a bit more nuanced because the ingredient has to fucking work. Because the main challenge with any brand in this space is retention, particularly online, but also like retention in retail. Are people buying it and coming back, or are they buying it once and sacking it off? It doesn't work.

So, hey Siri.

I've not seen anyone use Siri in about 100 years.

I actually do still.

Good morning.

How you doing?

You all right?

You good?

Good to see you. Welcome. Peptides are everywhere right now. Most of what I knew came from the internet, so we came to see what's really behind it. Neurotass is a Dublin company that uses AI to find peptides hidden in normal food. We're one of the brands using one of their newest ingredients. First problem, I didn't know what a peptide actually was, so we asked.

So peptides are small chains of amino acids, right? So between 2 and maybe 50 amino acids long, that's considered a peptide. I think another way to look at it is like, if you think of a book, right, a paragraph in a book, the paragraph might be the protein, right? The individual letters are the amino acids. A peptide might be 1 or 2 words out of the paragraph.

Sure.

Proteins are like the machinery in the cell, right? They do the functions. The peptides can be thought of as messengers or signals, right, to switch on or switch off different proteins in the body. And your cells actually use peptides to communicate. You know, your cells are kind of multilingual, and they're always in communication with other cells in the body. Body uses peptides to function, right? So you, you use peptides all the time. I mean, clean example I can think of is insulin or GLP-1, right? So, they're peptides that your body makes to carry out really essential bodily functions. Yeah.

I feel like the first time I saw the word peptides was on collagen peptides.

Yeah.

But is collagen a peptide?

So, collagen itself is not a peptide. Collagen is an enormous big protein. When we're talking about collagen peptides, generally speaking, that's just collagen that's just been hydrolyzed or chopped up into small chunks, right? So, remember we talked about the The protein is the paragraph and the peptide is the word. So, they've just broken the collagen down into small little pieces. I mean, a million different peptides can affect a million different biological functions, right? So, I think the fact that everyone lumps peptides in as one thing is probably the biggest misconception. I mean, there's a huge array of different things that peptides can do.

Like, is there a peptide spectrum? Because obviously, like, GLP-1s are very much like A medicine almost. You can't go and buy that in Holland and Barrett.

One of the things that distinguishes the difference between a medicine and let's say a supplement is how you make it. So all of those GLP-1s are synthetic peptides and they are heavily modified. What we do at Nouritas is we look for peptides that are found within natural plant sources that can affect different biological function.

So is it, there's 9 trillion possible peptides that can be indexed? Is that true?

Yeah.

So if you have, think about it, you've got amino acids, you have 21 amino acids. And I don't know, let's say you have up to 50 amino acids in a peptide.

Yeah.

So you have, you know, 21 amino acids possible in the first one, 21 amino acids possible in the second one, and so on and so on and so on up to the 50th space.

Yeah.

That's a lot of combinations, right? There's a huge amount of combinations that you can use. We've got this tool that we can point at pretty much anything. And we've got this enormous toolkit with peptides in that we can target a huge range of different proteins or biological effects.

Trillions of possible combinations. You simply can't test them all. So they built an AI. Their AI is called Magnifier. Think of it as a search engine for peptides. You give it a plant and it finds the few peptides that might be able to do a job.

So what actually happens when you put a plant into Magnifier? It reads the peptide sequences And it turns the sequences into mathematical fingerprints. It's a bit like you have to check every single grain found on a beach just manually versus like having a detector that like beeps when it's near to gold. So we have the models that are like dreaming, let's say, or designed like Generative models that are designing the peptides, but then these peptides compete against each other, like in a kind of a knockout tournament. And then at the end, only the winners are actually tested in the lab and they go through all the process of lab validation. At that point, you just work with a very limited number of candidates and it's like time efficient and cost efficient.

If I wanted something to just like lock me in for 10 hours, right, I want to be hyperfocused all day, hypothetically. Like, how could you just use the AI to like find a peptide or a combination of peptides that solves that problem?

The first thing is usually like a feasibility study, like feasibility part where we look at the area, we look at what is known in literature, and we identify the best like protein target, like the best receptor we can modulate or we can activate or we can inhibit like with a peptide. But yeah, like everything is possible in theory.

But a computer saying a peptide works isn't the same thing as it actually working. So who checks? Then they took us to the room they're most proud of. We had to dress up properly for this one.

So anybody else scientist here?

It's just an AI, AI Chad. Every machine in here costs more than the average house. This is the bit that stops it being AI hype. They don't trust the computer, they prove it.

Now what is in this room? These are the most expensive and, in my opinion, the coolest things, the coolest instruments that we have here. What is happening here in the— on these instruments? This is where chemistry and physics come together to explain biology using the language of mathematics. It doesn't get nerdier than that, and that's why I personally love it. Maybe you heard about LC-MS. Liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.

Once or twice, yeah.

Once or twice.

I definitely haven't.

What does that mean? Liquid chromatography is chemistry. Mass spectrometry is physics. So it's very sophisticated, very sensitive piece of equipment that can tell you difference in molecules at the atom level. So you know what this is? This is Google Translate. These instruments because they translate. the world of powders into worlds of letters.

Yeah.

That AI can look into. At the end, what we get is Excel sheets with a list of peptides.

Interesting.

That is fed into the computer, into AI magnifier. And then all the magic happens with prediction. Is something bioactive? Is it not? And all this.

Okay.

And that's why I say that this is a fiddle or a violin.

Okay.

Yeah. And the rest of the world is a construction site.

Yeah. How much do these machines cost?

At least a million.

For each one?

Yes.

Oh, wow.

Million and more.

This is maybe a very silly question, but in simple terms, if we're making a peptide, say PeptiSleep, what material are you starting with?

Excellent question. So first, as Alessandro was telling you, there is a magnifier. We— they predict peptides, which peptides could do what we want them to do. Those peptides are only predicted, but that's not where we stop. And that's what sets us apart from a lot of other companies using only AI to predict. We actually validate, and that's a huge differentiator. So once predicted. We synthesize those peptides, and now we check one by one in the bioactivity assay. Are they active or not? If they're active, okay, they're plus. If they're not, they're minus. Now the question is, where in nature can we find them? Can I find these 10 letters together that I need? So that gives us the recipe how to unlock it. Then we go into the ingredient lab downstairs. We know what enzymes we need to cut out the peptides that are predicted to be active. We hydrolyze, meaning we chop it up.

Yeah.

So we release or unlock those peptides. Because first, what we want to see is that, is that theoretical sequence really released?

Sure.

So we need to prove it. We prove it. Now we have a hydrolysate that has the peptides that were predicted and is bioactive, and that is our product.

Wow, this is above my IQ grade. You can't preface every question with, it's a stupid question. They're all stupid questions. We don't know what we're talking about.

One of the questions was, what was the feeling when you find something new? And for me, It was when I found out in the blood, when I found a peptide that's 36 amino acids long. For a long time in the scientific community, there was a belief that peptides cannot pass blood-brain barrier. So when I saw it in a mouse blood sample, for me, that was amazing. I still get goosebumps. There is also a question, why now? Why peptides now? Well, because we, our technology grew enough, so now we know how to address all these issues and actually find what was always there.

Ultimately, the ambition of the business is to find a peptide and create a peptide ingredient for every receptor in the human body. This is the ingredient we came for. We're putting it into a brand new product, but I wanted to know how they know that it works.

So it's a It's a brand new sleep ingredient. It's from brown rice and it contains a bioactive peptide network that essentially lowers your cortisol through a pathway called orexin. And by doing that, you can reduce your levels of stress. When your stress levels are reduced, you can subsequently sleep better. So it's about inducing that feeling of serenity so that you can naturally drift off into a healthier sleep. The way that our platform works is that it looks at nature as a library of peptides. So it's completely agnostic of source. We're essentially looking for words that are like individual peptide sequences in a library. So you're looking for any type of word in any type of book in any type of library. So it just happened to be that brown rice was, was the source that these peptides came from.

Why would you not just eat 100 grams of rice? Why would I have 250 mg, which is what, like 0.25% of 100 grams? Yeah, you know, it's not the same effect, right?

Absolutely. Now you can eat all rice you want. The enzymes that we have in our body, they're cutting those proteins in a certain pattern, but they're not cutting in that pattern to release the peptides that actually have a function. So that's why you need to use different enzymes that we don't have in our body to unlock those bioactive peptides and then to eat them.

I think people focus maybe on, on their quantity of sleep, right? They focus on hours. You know, I went to bed at 10 and I woke up at 8. But if we think about what sleep is actually supposed to do for our bodies, it's, it's all about restoration. So for your body, for your mind, you really want to feel restored so you can get up the next day and feel refreshed. So to do that, you really need to increase your time spent in deep sleep and REM sleep. So it's that quality of sleep as opposed to quantity. So we ran an 8-week study. It was a pilot study. So primarily we were looking at safety, but we did look at a subgroup of that study and participants that had sleep impairment. And we looked at sleep quality subjectively and objectively. So that means we included things like questionnaires. So they're clinically validated, but they're ways of, you know, how do you feel you slept? And we paired that then with wearable technology data. So we used the Oura Rings, and that allows you to collect passive biological data that you can't actually influence yourself. You know, sleep is a complex beast, and it can be really different. It can be impacted by different things for different people. So If you suffer with, you know, weight-related sleep problems or apnea, you know, this is unlikely to be the ingredient for you. So if you're someone who struggles with high stress, PeptiSleep is likely to be a really good ingredient for you to bring those levels down and give your body an opportunity for better sleep. So we always want to continue to develop the science, right? We're never finished with one clinical trial. The trial that we have run so far was a pilot study. As I mentioned, we look primarily at safety, a couple of efficacy metrics. So the goal now is to look at bigger populations, larger numbers, more endpoints, and to see, you know, because cortisol is so tightly linked with things like cognition and stress, can we actually expand into other areas and see changes in things like concentration, which we know if you've got a really bad night's sleep and you try and focus for a test or something the next day, it's not going to happen. So if we can relax the body, get a good night's sleep, can we impact those concentration, attention, cognition, all those types of things afterwards. So that's the next step. This ingredient started its life on a computer screen and ended its life, you know, in a human clinical study with people actually seeing changes on their wearable devices.

Could we put PeptiSleep in a can like that? Because that's our— absolutely, yeah, obviously other product, but that's like focus coffee.

Yeah, so it's been formulated in a ton of different products, right? And it's a really, really small dose, 250 mgs. If it's something like this and it's not a completely clear beverage No issues at all.

You know the film Limitless?

Yes.

With Bradley Cooper. Do you think there's a point at which you can like design an ingredient that does genuinely make your brain, you know, far more powerful? Or is that just like science fiction?

Diet and nutrition can bring you so far, right? But there's maybe like 5% of the biohacking or the optimization that you can kind of only achieve maybe with supplements and peptides. I don't know about the brain capacity and the things he could do is pretty amazing in the movie, but You know, close to it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe one day. Yeah, maybe one day.

I came here thinking peptides were a TikTok trend. I'm leaving thinking this might be the start of something huge. Probably not superhuman just yet. Thanks so much to everyone at Neurotask for letting us film basically everything. If you want to see what we do with it, the link's below.