New company mining massive protein database for new medical foods, supplements and drugs

Pronutria calls its technology ProNutrien, and is currently advancing into human clinical testing to improve health and treat significant medical conditions mediated by amino acid biology, including muscle, metabolic, and rare diseases.  Pronutria has created a platform for identifying proteins in the human diet that, when delivered in pure form, provide a preferred balance of amino acids that elicit a pharmacological effect.  The technology is based on what the company calls the “precise and reproducible delivery of specific amino acids.”​

Medical foods and drugs​

The company is aiming these targeted protein products first at the medical foods and possibly the pharmaceutical spaces, said CEO Bob Connelly.  Dietary supplements and food ingredients are also possibilities down the road.

The building blocks for these products come out of that massive database. Assembling that information has been the work of the past couple of years, Connelly said.

“I can look out my window and see a Whole Foods. The team literally was going over there every day and buying initially unprocessed whole foods and later some of the processed foods,”​ Connelly told NutraIngredients-USA.

“Things they were looking at were, what are the mixes of proteins in these foods?  How abundant are they? And then they were combining that information with a lot of public data on amino acids, which is just a lot of hard work.”​

The team eventually assembled a library which the company claims now extends to more than a billion protein nutrients.   In addition, the company developed proprietary approaches to select product candidates with pharmacological benefits, physical characteristics and safety profiles tailored to specific medical needs and population segments. 

Wide application​

The company sees a wide field of possible applications for the technology. Amino acid mediated biology is at the heart of a wide range of medical conditions, and both drugs and medical foods that affect this biology can play a critical role in their treatment and support.  Patients with rare diseases, such phenylketonuria, have an inability to properly metabolize specific amino acids.  In other diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and cystic fibrosis, patients suffer from impaired amino acid uptake that exacerbates their condition.  And millions suffer from muscle and metabolic diseases where there is a mechanistic link between amino acid biology and the underlying disease pathophysiology. 

Pronutria’s technology unlocks benefits that might be hidden in everyday foods, Connelly said.

“If you eat a piece of steak, that steak is a delivery vehicle for a lot of different things.  It does deliver a lot of different proteins,”​ Connelly said.

Manufacturing specific proteins​

Mining specific proteins out of the diet is all fine and good, but what if there are not enough of a given protein in the source material?  It’s a similar question that hovers over botanical ingredient discovery—that might be an interesting molecule, but how are you going to get enough of it if there is only a tiny amount in the parent plant?

Pronutia’s answer is after identifying what they are after, they will make it, not extract it.  But they’ll make it in such a way as to avoid having to chemically synthesize the molecules by using a microbial process already used for enzyme manufacture.

“The organisms we are growing are used to make food enzymes. These are GRAS organisms,”​ Connelly said. Some major food companies have looked at the technology are comfortable with it, he said.

“ ‘Natural’ is a loaded word and there are a lot of different definitions. But I can say that (this technology) is not genetically modified,” ​Connelly said.

Tests under way​

The first ingredients are in the test phase, Connelly said, and the results of those tests will determine where they go from here.

“Our two lead candidates are entering clinical trials next month in an elderly population looking at muscle protein synthesis. This a relatively fast trial and we will make a determination whether to pursue a medical food path or a drug path,”​ Connelly said.