BASF and Nuritas Use AI to Develop New Food Ingredients

BASF’s Human Nutrition business is partnering with Dublin, Ireland-based biotechnology company Nuritas to discover and bring to market new bioactive peptide food ingredients that offer health benefits using the Irish company’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and DNA analysis technology, the companies announced in Jan. 18 joint press release.

“The ingredients that will be brought to the market are going to be truly life-changing,” said Emmet Browne, chief executive officer of Nuritas in the release.

Nuritas’ technology uses AI, deep computations, and DNA analysis to “rapidly and efficiently” predict and help utilize peptides within food, short chains of amino acids occurring naturally that can offer health benefits by signaling certain molecules in the body.

The first component of the deal gives BASF an exclusive, royalty-based license to commercialize one of Nuritas’ existing peptides for use across a number of applications, the companies said in the release. The second half of the collaboration involves discovering new peptides based on health issues that offer strategic importance to BASF’s customers.

“We think Nuritas is bringing a truly unique and innovative approach in addition to the actual ingredient on the table,” said Francois Scheffler, head of BASF’s Global Human Nutrition and Pharma Solutions businesses in a statement. “Therefore our cooperation with them makes us as BASF an even stronger partner for our customers, to fully support them in delivering highly efficacious solutions under the Newtrition brand – which means delivering the right nutrients to the right people at the right time.”

Nuritas was founded in 2014 by Dr. Nora Khaldi, a mathematician and computational biologist, to discover food ingredients that offer health benefits.

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