Title : Novel peptides as food ingredient for weight management
Abstract:
Obesity has become a global epidemic, presenting significant health challenges and increasing the risk of various chronic diseases. Current approaches to weight management, including pharmaceutical interventions like GLP-1 receptor agonists (e.g., Semaglutide) and invasive procedures, have limitations in long-term effectiveness and sustainability. Lembas develops a novel approach to obesity treatment using in-silico designed peptides that activate nutrient-sensing proteins in the L cells of the small intestine, promoting the release of satiety hormones.
Our innovative method combines generative protein machine learning (ML) models with in-silico evolution to design peptides that bind to key residues of proteins regulating satiety peptide release. These designed peptides are evaluated using an ensemble of structural prediction models, ensuring high-confidence binding predictions. Unlike current systemic treatments, our approach targets the local gut-brain axis, potentially mimicking the natural oscillation pattern of satiety peptides more closely.
The designed peptides are hypothesized to induce conformational changes in target proteins upon binding, promoting the release of satiety hormones, like GLP-1, PPY and GIP from the intestine to the bloodstream. This localized approach may offer advantages over systemic treatments in terms of reduced side effects and improved long-term efficacy.
Lembas peptides will be produced to serve as supplement food ingredients that will replace the need to use GLP-1 based drugs, and will be consumed as part of the daily food intake.
