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Nuritas is a Dublin-based biotechnology company that uses artificial intelligence to find small molecules that have health and wellness properties. Nuritas has offices in the UK and Boston. The three lines of business include partnering with industry to find targets identified by the customer, to identify bioactives that can be licensed to an industry partner or further developed by Nuritas and the development of consumer products like ingredients for functional and health foods.
Investors in the company include Marc Benioff, Salesforce founder and Bono and The Edge from Irish rock band U2. The company is working with Nestlé to discover bioactive peptide networks in natural food sources.
Nuritas was an Irish Times Innovation awards finalist in the health and life sciences category. Nuritas was founded by Dr. Nora Khaldi who has a background in mathematics before moving into bioinformatics. Dr. Khaldi developed a platform that uses AI and machine learning to discover bioactive ingredients. The platform starts with the identification of a target for which a peptide may be useful and the discovery engine identifies candidate molecules that are tested in the company’s integrated wet lab in Dawson Street in Dublin. Animal and human testing are the next steps. Results of testing also validate the platform’s predictions and are fed back to the system to improve its prediction capability. The system’s prediction rate was reported to improve over five years.
The large biopharma company BASF announced late 2018 that it will bring to market PetAIde, a product identified using Nuritas’s proprietary platform, that is a patented network of anti-inflammatory bioactive peptides. As of 2018 the product was reported to be launching in the US with Asia Pacific and European launched expected in 2019.
PetAIde is comprised of a peptide network form rice protein that was developed to alleviate inflammation by modulating cytokine responsed and immune activity. The product is used as a sports nutrition ingredient with the potential to provide anti-inflammatory physiological benefits after exercise.
