NPEW 2025: Nuritas unveils PeptiSleep for AI-powered next-gen sleep support
26 Mar 2025 | Nuritas
At Natural Products Expo West (NPEW) 2025, Nuritas introduced PeptiSleep, an AI-powered peptide derived from rice bran protein. We sat down with Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller, Nuritas’ chief medical and innovation officer, to discuss how AI accelerated peptide discovery, cutting “25 years” off traditional methods by identifying peptides that precisely target receptors. Franklyn-Miller also detailed PeptiSleep’s biological mechanisms, including its ability to reduce cortisol secretion, and shared clinical findings on its superior effectiveness in improving sleep quality across all stages compared to traditional ingredients like melatonin.
This is Yolanda von Heal from Nutrition Insight.
I'm here at Natural Products Expo West with Andy from Neritas, who is the chief medical officer at the company.
Thank you for joining us today, and I know you've just launched Pepti Sleep, a new product, and I'm really curious how Neritas' AI powered peptide platform contributed to the discovery and development of that product.
Pepti Sleep comes from rice bran or rice protein, and if we were to try to identify the peptides that work within Pepti Sleep, normally, just by trial and error, it could take us 25 years.
What AI has enable us to do is to pick a receptor, identify a peptide that will match with that receptor to work, and then identify that from a library of over 9 million plant peptides.
The accuracy of that is about 80%, and that's unheard of, and we're able to do that because we can use a combination of generative modeling, so we can take how that peptide might look, how similar peptides might look, and then predict how they'll respond.
Of course, we need to be able to survive the gut, we need to be able to be absorbed in the jejunum, and we want to make sure the half-life works.
And that is all behind the scenes, so that's biological real data, which feeds into the platform, which is extrapolated by AI in order to get the accuracy of that interaction.
Awesome, and can you elaborate a bit on the biological mechanisms behind Pepti Sleep, and specifically how it reduces cortisol, which I understand is crucial for sleep quality.
Absolutely, so we have a normal rhythm to our day.
During the day, as we wake up, cortisol rises through the middle of the day and then starts to taper off towards the end of the day.
Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland in the brain, which does exactly the same, but in the evening, so as cortisol drops off, melatonin increases and then falls off in the morning.
How pepti sleep works is we target the EEA receptor, that's at the adrenal cortex, at the kidney, so it's peripheral, it's not in the brain, it works peripherally.
And what we do is block that with a peptide to enable the cortisol release to be lowered, so we suppress cortisol release.
Now, cortisol is a hormone, it's a stress hormone.
So if someone's about to hit us on the head with a club, our heart rate variability narrows, we become tense, cortisol goes up.
And obviously we lead pretty stressful lives.
We're busy, we don't have enough sleep, we don't live our way the, the optimum way.
And so by lowering cortisol, we improve heart rate variability, that parasympathetic nervous activity, and we relax, and hence it's vital for managing the whole of sleep, rather than just getting to sleep.
Interesting, and I know that melatonin, as you already mentioned it, is a go to supplement for consumers.
How do, how does Pepto Sleep position itself as a natural alternative?
In, in our clinical trial with Pepto Sleep, we use a questionnaire called the Leeds Sleep evaluation questionnaire.
It divides sleep into four phases, getting to sleep, sleep quality, behavior in and around waking, and then how you feel in the morning after waking.
Hefty sleep has improved sleep in every one of those quadrants, so getting to sleep, quality of sleep, and morning behavior.
What we see with melatonin is usually it works very in getting to sleep, but it doesn't work across those other phases of sleep.
And so often you get grogginess in the morning, it disrupts your day to day rhythm, and actually over time the effect wears off, but there's also a dependency, you need more and more melatonin in order to get the same effect.
So with Pepti Sleep, we've seen no dependency effects, and it works from day one, so there's no incremental levels.
And when we look at cortisol in the morning, it's back to normal levels.
OK, awesome.
And I understand that you've done a study with wearables to test the Pepti sleep's impact.
How has the real-time data from those wearables validated its impact and.
Where do you see this type of elevation in the future of ingredient testing?
I, I think one of the most exciting things about this study is the use of wearables.
So, so often we see almost 2/3 of Americans have trouble sleeping.
About 40% of people track their sleep with wearable technology.
The challenge is, what do you do?
Sleep hygiene is the only normal intervention.
Take away screens in a dark room, have the temperature rise.
But if you can't do anything else, that's the challenge.
So being able to see the effectiveness, the impact of an ingredient in a wearable is really important to neuroests.
And what we saw very clearly was we improved total sleep, we improved readiness, we improved sleep quality.
We increase deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep, which fits with the clinical trial data very in the subject of the questionnaires.
Now the questionnaires are validated clinically, so that's what others use, but we're able here to show the end consumer, and for our customers, they can show their end consumer how effective the ingredient is.
Yeah.
And I'm also curious beyond sleep support, where do you see the greatest potential for AI discovered planned peptides in addressing other consumer health concerns?
Neurotas's mission is very much to improve the lives of billions and improve their health.
We see ourselves as having a Neurotas peptide product in every product.
We're working across multiple verticals.
We started with muscle health, with Pepti strong.
We're now looking at sleep, because there's an impact in health.
If we improve the, the length of time to go to sleep, if we shorten that, you can make a 5% impact in all-cause mortality.
And that's how we design our ingredients.
Our next ingredient to come later in the year, PFT control, looks at glucose metabolism and managing the glucose spike, really being able to change a product from more high GI to more low GI, opening up opportunities.
And we've got other products in the pipeline in terms of gut health, cholesterol management, bone, female health specifically, and cognition.
Thank you, thank you so much.
