Nora (00:00.128)
You hear me fine, you see me fine, all good, yeah? I hear you perfectly, okay, because I don't have any headphones with me.
Kim Vopni (00:02.641)
Oh yeah, it's all good. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's totally fine. And just to clarify, Caldy is how I pronounce your last name. Yeah, NorCaldy. Yeah, perfect. Okay. Yes. Yeah, perfect. Awesome. All right, let's get going. I'm sorry, I said it before.
Nora (00:11.564)
Yeah, Nora Caldey, yeah. Yeah, and Yuritas. You said it earlier really well. Yeah.
Kim Vopni (00:24.571)
Hi everybody, welcome to today's call. Welcome to Dr. Nora Caldy who's joining us from Neurotas. Just as a quick aside, I mentioned it in the intro, but I have a supplement line. Our brand is called Rejuve and in that product line we have a product called Buff Plus, which is creatine, Peptis Strong, which Peptis Strong is a peptide from Neurotas, which we're gonna learn about today and folic acid. And we designed this specific for
Really for the pelvic floor, although the rest of the body, the rest of the muscles in the body are not immune to the support that this product offers. anybody who knows me knows I apply fitness principles to the pelvic floor, but also the nutrition component, the supplement component that we are using to support our entire body is also from a muscle perspective going to apply to the pelvic floor as well. So I wanted to have Dr. Palade on. She is the CEO and co-founder, I believe, of
of neurotasks, that correct? are the co-founder? Yeah, founder. Okay, sorry, founder. That's bigger. I wanted to have her on to share a little bit about what are peptides? What is peptistrong? How can it support our muscle health knowing, you know, so many people are now talking about muscle being the organ of longevity. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon talks a lot about that. I think probably coined that terminology. anyway, that was just a quick little intro.
Nora (01:24.182)
No worries.
Kim Vopni (01:51.471)
Dr. Caldy, thank you so much for joining us. If you could kindly provide a little bit of an intro of who you are, how did you come to found Neurotas, and then we'll jump into the more specifics about Peptis Strong.
Nora (02:03.97)
Thanks, Kim. So I...
I'm a, by background, Kim, I'm a pure mathematician and computer scientist and I worked many years in applying it to different areas, including pharmaceuticals and drug discovery and understanding basically how molecules in nature have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. And then I came to the area of nutrition after my PhD when I was doing my postdoc.
And I discovered a whole area in need of improvement, but also an incredible area that could impact billions of people. Because we we eat, consume every single day. And the impact those things that we do on a single day daily basis can really have huge, huge impact on our health. So this is how my journey started. I came into this area.
realize that a lot of the ingredients that we're using in everyday products are
are actually very old ingredients discovered, you know, like a hundred years ago, 70 years ago, for a totally different consumer mindset, for a totally different reason. And there are very, very few consumer centric ingredients today that are really created or discovered to address what consumers today are looking for. And the reason was because creating new ingredients that have a health benefit or finding them in nature actually takes decades
Nora (03:35.574)
decades and costs a lot of money, hundreds of millions. And I've been in those consortiums where it takes forever. And so coming into it from a math background, it was how can we accelerate the discovery? How can we first understand what consumers are looking for? What are they looking for? What are the major areas of health where we could benefit from using nature? Because nature has evolved over, like I said, hundreds of millions of years to create solutions
to many, many different things. It's just as humans, we haven't really found the solution to everything yet. And so on one side you have that, on the other side you have consumer needs are changing and they're changing pretty fast. You have tools of AI tools and wearables and biosensors allowing us to make better choices. Those technologies are also moving fast.
But you have old technology that's not capable of finding these molecules faster to address this consumer. And I always give this as an example, pepT-strong that you mentioned, Kim, in your product is an ingredient that would have taken 30 million years to discover via the current techniques of discovery. That means impossible.
Kim Vopni (04:50.149)
Wow, right.
Nora (04:51.97)
given combinations. So, and through machine learning, through our AI technology and the years we spent developing this AI technology and proven it, we are now capable of starting off with a consumer need, understanding the biology of that consumer need. What does it actually mean? For example, improving muscle or maintaining muscle or improving sleep. What does it actually mean from a biological perspective? And then translating that into an AI question.
and asking the AI to go off and look into nature and find solutions that nature has already evolved to kind of perform similar mechanisms in different other spaces and bring those to life. the modality we're focused on are the types of ingredients we're focused on are peptides. I can tell you a little bit more about peptides, peptides are interesting because I call them the language of life. They're everywhere and they tell us what to do on a single
daily basis. So everything we do, all the mechanisms we perform, a lot of them are via the signaling and the messaging of peptides. So pepti-strong is a peptide, our combination of peptides from fava bean, for example. So the story really has been, with Neurotas and myself, has been the realization that we could really transform human health and optimize it if we understood nature better. And there are tools to do that. And this is where
my own background came into it, the AI, the the the mathematics background to optimize the way we look at nature and tie it into needs of consumers of today and make ingredient discovery possible again so that we create ingredients that really address what we're going after and truly have impact because ultimately
you can touch billions of people through what they eat and what they drink and you can influence their health long term through what they eat and what they drink. Not just when they get sick but before that really maintaining things longer, optimizing our muscle, optimizing the way we sleep, optimizing our recovery etc. So these are some of the areas we're working on and this is why I founded Neurotas at the beginning.
Kim Vopni (07:09.443)
Amazing story. It's funny how, you know, mathematician comes to health and nutrition, you know, supplement company, but the way you've explained it, it's a really, really cool path and connection. A big thing that I talk about in my community is the importance of muscle, of course, and this is whole body muscle, but we're talking most specifically about the pelvic floor in my community. People think of exercise and
in particular strengthening as being what they need to fix, quote unquote, fix their pelvic floor problem. part of my communication is it's not just about the exercise, it's not just about the strengthening exercise, it's about the rest, it's about the recovery, it's also about what you put into your body so your body has the substrate that it can use to then rebuild from the work part of what you do.
And part of that is protein or peptide. So if you could elaborate a little bit on what is a peptide, you gave us a quick little high level there, but elaborate a little bit more on what is a peptide.
Nora (08:18.146)
Yeah, the fundamentals I agree on, like, it's not just about exercise. As we age, there are many, many other things we need to be doing as well.
And I'll come to that from a muscle perspective, but from a peptide perspective, it's an interesting story because given, I worked on different molecules, totally different molecules from fats to sugars to proteins, large, small proteins, all types of metabolites. And when I was founding Neurotas at the beginning, I put together a matrix of what are...
what are the type, what type of molecule should we be focused on in order to improve the life civilians? And it was a decision matrix of like regulatory access. So having access, because you want to give access to health to everyone, not just a subset of the population. Being able to produce it at scale.
Is it readily available or is it specifically in certain islands in the Galapagos? know, how do we access it?
what are the, how's the stability looking like? Because obviously as you formulate these molecules, need to be stable in formulation, need to, you know, they need to be on the shelf at different temperatures, et cetera. So I put a matrix together and peptides came up every single time as the best modality to go after. And why is that? Because like I mentioned, peptides are the major signaling molecule in the human body. They are the messengers that tell us what to do. People have heard about, you
Nora (10:05.098)
hormonal peptides which can operate at a larger scale but then there's the peptides we're looking at which operate specifically on certain mechanisms and just start a signal to tell the body what to do or to tell the cell what to do.
And those are the peptides we're interested in. There are different peptides. The ones we are focused on are ones that are carried by proteins. So they're inside a protein. Within the protein, they're inactive. And that's the beauty about peptides. They're only active when you need them. So if you look at how species have evolved, whether it's mammals, plants, et cetera, a lot of these proteins that they carry
actually within them peptides and these peptides are only expressed when the plant needs it or the human needs it. Interesting thing in blood pressure when you have different peptides expressed depending on your blood pressure.
you know, have peptides that are released in our bodies when our blood pressure is high, peptides that are released when our blood pressure is low, and you want to bring it up, and that balance is performed by peptides within the same, carried by the same protein, etc. And that is something that has evolved in nature really in a very interesting way. So what we're interested in is, again, we're looking for peptides within proteins,
that once cleaved out of the protein, they perform. And what that means is that, for example, with PeptiStrong, PeptiStrong influences and helps muscle recovery, maintenance and strength augmentation, and stops or reduces muscle degradation.
Nora (11:58.062)
And what's interesting about those peptides is that they come from fava bean. But if we eat fava bean as humans, we don't get the benefits of those peptides because our body breaks them up randomly. What we're doing through our technologies is that we're finding them in fava bean and then we're releasing them so people actually get the additional benefit, not only the nutritional benefit of a fava bean, but the additional benefit that are hidden from us as humans when we consume something.
so number one, white peptides, they are the language of life. They are the major signaling molecule. They're found everywhere. You can literally be as specific as possible in telling the cell what to do. And it's a messenger. It just tells it, and then it disappears. Your body gets rid of it. And on top of all that, they are nutrients like proteins. So ultimately, when your body breaks it up, it transforms on top of that into a nutritional ingredient.
So amino acids like the protein would do. So that's why peptides, really interesting types of molecules. And we focused, it was literally at that time, Kim, when I first started working on peptides, everyone was like, first, what is a peptide? Now, I think the awareness of peptides is growing significantly. And secondly, it's like, why peptides? Because they were known, at that time, peptides were known to be very easily...
weren't known to be stable, so it was hard to stabilize them, and they weren't known to be bioavailable. But when I first started at that time, I'm like, those are issues we can find solutions to because the universe of peptides is so big.
that as humans, we've only explored a very few of them. And there are plenty of space to explore for peptides that are more bioavailable, that are more stable, et cetera. And that's what we did through the technologies to explore. It's peptides is the largest known space to humans in terms of numbers of molecules. As humans, like I said, we've only explored very few. And as we explored it more and more with the AI system, billions and billions and billions of peptides, you would find peptides. And this is what we did, find peptides are orally
Nora (14:15.696)
available, that are stable. We have peptides like peptides strong, has three years of shelf stability at any temperature. You can put it and the activity would resist and that's huge. But at that time was like, well, they're not going to be stable or not. And we found ways. So yeah, so that's the story of peptides. And then I think your second part was maybe on muscle.
Kim Vopni (14:27.781)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (14:37.958)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (14:42.817)
Yes, I just want to add in one little point there that I think for some people the word peptide seems new. But if I think of people who have been consuming collagen, collagen has been around and it's collagen peptides. Anybody who's maybe in more of the health, longevity space, biohacker space will have heard the explosion around peptides. Also, GLPs, ozempic, those are peptides. So I think that there's maybe
It can be confusing for people as to what does, know, a weight loss peptide seems different from a collagen peptide from a pepty strong peptide. Does that make sense? And maybe help some clarity. Yeah.
Nora (15:26.102)
Yes, I get what you're saying. so ultimately, in brief, a peptide is a short protein. It's a short protein that goes from potentially dipeptide to amino acids to about 50. Some people say to 100. It really depends. The definitions are loose in terms of when do you stop calling a peptide a peptide and it becomes a protein. The difference is that proteins are
they're not already available, they get broken down. Peptides can be, they can be very precise in terms of activity. So they carry certain signaling activities. And the difference is people...
have heard of many molecule names but wouldn't associate it to a peptide. Insulin would be a hormonal peptide. So there's hormones, different classes of peptides. There's hormonal peptides and there's very clear, precise cell signaling peptides, which is what we're developing, not hormones. Hormones like, for example, GLP1 antagonists, all those are hormones. Insulin, melatonin, all those are peptides that people have been consuming for quite a while, a long time.
Kim Vopni (16:12.41)
Exactly.
Nora (16:37.584)
and growth factors within the sports nutrition area or other areas, those are hormonal peptides as well.
Other ones, other peptides, other classes of peptides are very more precise in terms of what activity you want them to do. It's not a global activity, it's a very precise, so muscle, skeletal muscle, and precisely on, for example, reducing degradation of muscle, improving muscle production, et cetera.
Kim Vopni (17:07.439)
Right. Yeah. So as you say, essentially peptides really, the perfect description and explanation is they are signaling molecules.
Nora (17:15.832)
They're signaling molecules and they're short proteins. I call them protein 2.0, so they're the whole next generation of protein. Protein is simply a nutrient. You're getting your building blocks. But if your cells are not really working the right way, are not performing the right way, no matter how much nutrition you pour on them, they're not gonna use it the right way. A peptide is not just nutritional, it actually is also fixing and improving
Kim Vopni (17:22.129)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (17:25.711)
Right, right.
Kim Vopni (17:36.773)
Right, right.
Nora (17:45.776)
improving the system for it to use your nutrients better. Yeah. muscle is an interesting and that's one of the first areas we explored. Now there are many areas Neurotas is exploring because we are a biotech and we're developing different solutions in different areas.
Kim Vopni (17:49.967)
Right, so that's the perfect segue then into now kind of the purpose behind when we think of muscle.
Nora (18:14.464)
Muscle was something that was very close to my own interest as well because it's the first, probably first organ that visibly ages. Whether it's your face, drooping, et cetera, whether it's your body, whether... So you can literally see it. There are many things that age inside of you, but you can't really see, but muscle, can't. It's very visible.
It's connected to our movement, so everything we do every single day is connected to how we move, how we perform, our energy levels, our metabolic rates, et cetera, is connected to the health of the muscle. And now there's a lot of research coming in showing its connectivity to many other applications, including muscle, including bone density, bone health in general, and immunity and other.
connectivity within the body. So it is a central system. It's the largest organ. So we're looking, thinking, okay, this is huge, huge. no one was really focused on it outside sports nutrition.
So we started looking into it well before because again of the core element it It plays important role at all stages of life from early learning how to move to like maintaining that and through your junior age and into your adulthood and then maintaining that as we grow older even in bed rest and hospital. know that the thing that kills most people is not the disease you
but actually it's a lack of strength and that is connected to your health of the muscle. I think the entire muscle is such a core element that if you don't focus on it...
Nora (20:05.96)
you're losing a lot of other areas, not just the muscle itself, you're losing a lot of health and your health jevity in general and how healthy you will live is going to be impacted significantly. So we started with that kind of core and the question was what exists today in terms of solution to maintain your muscle and to maintain your strength? And there was a lot of studies coming out showing that when
that connect basically muscle and strength in somewhat they're connected, but sometimes actually not always correlated fully and I'll explain, but ultimately they looked at, let's say there's a lot of like Harvard studies or other studies that looked at population wide break it. So when people come into hospital with a broken wrist, a broken leg, et cetera.
what happens then and they'll follow them over five years and they showed that basically over the five years when they put on a cast and they'll remove it etc. When they remove it they start a five-year clock and they showed that
your muscle itself can return to baseline pretty relatively quickly. It takes a few months, know, with some exercise, etc. It comes back to normal, but your strength actually never comes back within the five years.
It takes a lot longer and it really is hard to bring back your strength of whatever you broke to the level it was at baseline before your breakage, before you broke your arm or wrist. And that actually is very telling in terms of maintaining strength. Strength is really connected to your longevity or significantly reducing all cause mortality as well, cancers, et cetera. It's really directly connected to strength.
Nora (21:59.465)
and your muscle health. So we started off with that saying, okay, how can we, what are the solutions today that are given?
In the pharmaceutical space, there's not much at all. In the prevention space, there are proteins. So people are said, OK, take more protein. There is HMB, creatine, et cetera. But ultimately, if you look at protein, it is a nutrient. So you're pouring nutrition on maybe underperforming cells. The issue is the cell is not performing the way it should be performing.
that's when Neurotask was focused on can we find in nature peptides that could tell the cell to perform better, to optimize the way it uses the building blocks, to optimize the way it produces protein, to optimize the way protein is degraded so we don't degrade as much protein, and also to improve recovery through reduction of inflammation.
Those were the major targets we asked the AI system to develop and or to discover. And we wanted all three mechanisms to be in one source, not different sources, but one source. So the AI system went off. I simplify it. I simplify what it does, but I identified fava bean as a source of those peptides.
Kim Vopni (23:17.345)
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Nora (23:26.27)
identified the exact proteins those peptides were in and how we could access those peptides and remove them from the protein to give access to.
unlock them from the protein to give access to consumers. And this is what we did. We identified those peptides. We then tested them in various different ways, including three human clinicals, to show that what these peptides do beyond the nutritional part is that they're telling the cell.
to perform better in a way. And this is, I always give this example as a basis. It's like an engine in a car. If the engine isn't performing, you can pour all the gas you want in the engine, in the car. It's not gonna perform better. What we're actually telling the cell, it's a perform better to go back to an earlier state. And what the peptides do is as well as augment mitochondrial biogenesis.
So it really returns the cell to a healthier state and your cell starts performing better. Obviously, some of the clinicals we did were in the absence of exercise and some of them were with exercise and exercise always helps. It always kind of accelerates. But in the absence, we've seen some really good results as well, significant results in augmenting the heartbeat.
So obviously muscle, but strength is really the core attribute that people do not want to lose as we age. And that is for pelvic floor, that was for every aspect of our body in terms of muscle.
Kim Vopni (25:13.585)
Yeah. Yeah, that's super fascinating. So I mean, without getting we don't have to go super nitty gritty. I want to clarify a couple things. One, you said mitochondrial biogenesis for the people that aren't familiar with some of the terminology, the mitochondria. So mitochondrial, everybody, most people might remember powerhouse of the cell back from biology. So this is an energy center of our cells.
Nora (25:41.326)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (25:43.237)
Biogenesis, creation, yeah, just so people understand it's sort of like the creation of energy. okay. The other, so you've talked about, right.
Nora (25:45.462)
is production. Yeah.
Nora (25:50.528)
Absolutely. Yeah.
So that's literally what the muscle does. The biggest carrier of mitochondria in the body are muscle cells. And as we age, and when I say as we age, we're talking from 28 onwards. Usually before 28, we're full of energy, but as we age from 28 onwards, our...
Kim Vopni (26:06.385)
Yeah.
Nora (26:13.678)
mitochondria comes, number of mitochondria in our cells come down, our metabolism in general comes down in the skeletal muscle. Everything's in reverse. It's like going downhill and you want to maintain it up the hill. know, that's the, yeah.
Kim Vopni (26:25.231)
Right, right.
Kim Vopni (26:29.701)
Yeah. Well, and I talk a lot about sarcopenia. So sarcopenia being age related muscle loss, which that doesn't start, you know, when we're considered quote unquote old, that's that's starting in our 20s and 30s. It's and we are deep. We've never even often heard of those terms. So that's that's kind of a sidebar. We'll get to that maybe a bit more in detail. But the faba bean
Nora (26:43.138)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (26:53.815)
You then have the technology you're not obviously needing to disclose that the nitty gritty of that but you're extracting a peptide from the fab a bean and you've put it into. This formula you're calling a pep to strong is it literally just extracts from fab a bean and nothing else.
Nora (27:09.742)
It's basically you take the proteins of the fava bean and you target the peptides within to release them. So the minute the peptide is released from the protein, it's activated. It now is active. So we're basically allowing
Kim Vopni (27:25.051)
Right, right.
Nora (27:31.862)
a lot of the plants we consume every day or not just plants, like it can be any types of sources, can be marine sources, et cetera, to have a much bigger impact on human health than they do today. A lot of people, for example, our ancestors, but also even today, overnight oats and...
those it's a way for us to access things in these sources that otherwise you can't access if you just need it. But our ancestors used to, for example, ferment milk to create kefir or cheeses or yogurts, etc. to augment shelf life. Because what happened if you look at the molecular level, they were releasing antimicrobial and antifungal peptides and other molecules too, but a lot of antimicrobial peptides
that actually were killing off bacteria and fungal contamination and augmenting the shelf life because there were no fridges. So they knew by fermenting and meaning breaking down the protein of the sources you could change the properties of a source, you could create completely new properties and that's what we're doing on a more precise
more precise way. it's like identifying among the trillions of different molecules and different sources which one would have that benefit and how can we access it.
And can we access it? Because today, Neurotas, for example, we lie on billions of incredible peptides that today we can't access. We're sitting on them. There are ones we can access, like PeptiStrong was one we're lucky to access, meaning we could find a way to get it out of the material and allow it access to consumers.
Kim Vopni (29:20.347)
Right, and PeptiStrong is your trademark term for that peptide, which is in a powder form. And in our product, we have put it together with fulvic acid and creatine. And we recommend people add it to a smoothie or to some yogurt or to a soup or stew. And as you've said, temperature doesn't matter. So you can put it into anything and not degrade it.
Nora (29:24.024)
That's it.
Nora (29:43.788)
We, like we've, that was essential in order for, that was the mission of Neurotest. The mission of Neurotest is to prove the lives of billions. That means giving access to health to everyone.
in every condition. And that includes super high temperatures where we've boiled literally peptide strong and looked at whether the activity remains for a certain period of time, like, you know, 20 minutes, but that's it. And we've we've put it in very harsh condition, acidic, basic, etc. and looked at whether it survives or not. But ultimately,
Kim Vopni (30:06.341)
Right, Yep.
Nora (30:20.47)
And this is separate from a neuro task perspective. This is separate for me because ultimately I am a scientist. Everyone should be taking something like peptis. Everyone should be taking BeptiSong simply because it is telling our cells, skeletal muscle cells to perform at their best. And everyone needs to maintain their muscle for as long as they can. It pushes away everything out. And that's core.
Kim Vopni (30:45.903)
Yeah, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that.
In terms of the cl- you mentioned you've done some clinical trials with humans. Can you elaborate a little on kind of your, what were you trying to determine? What was you, how was the study performed? What were the results? Just kind of high level of the studies you've done.
Nora (31:10.294)
Yeah. So when we start doing, when for every molecule we discover and take to market, Peptis-Chong was our first. Now there was many others behind like Peptis Sleep, et cetera. And all of them go through the same kind of process in terms of identification and then proving it first in the lab, on cells, into preclinical. And then we go into clinical and clinical, human clinicals. And we always start with the first one being
more of a pilot but it's still very, it's one where we say, okay, does this ingredient work in human and how much does it perform? And we usually go extreme. So in this one, we basically went extreme and we took individuals and we casted one of their legs. And that was hard actually to recruit for Kim. was very hard to recruit people that want to cast their leg. So the reason we wanted to cast your legs because
Kim Vopni (32:01.893)
Yeah, I could imagine.
Nora (32:10.772)
when you cast someone's leg you immediately create atrophy pretty fast because you know people when they cast, when the cast is removed their arms or legs are much thinner and the strength is kind of half gone.
We wanted to mimic that and we casted them and we surveyed them over the casting period and then we removed the cast and we surveyed them over the recovery period of two weeks. And what happened then is, and we left one leg proper, the other leg casted.
And also, by the way, what we did is the recovery period, we didn't do any exercise. just normal recovery. We send them back home and whatever they did, they did. But ultimately, there was no kind of systematic recovery and physio and exercise. It was go back and do whatever you're doing. So.
to mimic a bit what happens in life. And what was interesting was we were looking first at from start to removing the cast of how much muscle has been lost, how much, and an effect on strength. We took biopsies all along. We looked at...
So we looked at how much muscle was lost. We looked at strength and we looked at inflammation and different markers of inflammation. So what we noticed was obviously when the cast was removed, there was significant reduction in muscle and however significantly less within the arm where Peptis strong was applied. So there was significantly less muscle loss and strength loss by the way as well. We measured at the end of the casting period.
Nora (33:59.552)
And then during the phase of recovery, if you remember what I was mentioning earlier when they did the studies and they found that actually going back to baseline and muscle is faster, but when it comes to strength, it never really recovers. What we noticed was in the placebo group, they actually, at the end, they recovered by 60 % of their muscle, but they never recovered their strength.
Kim Vopni (34:08.869)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (34:28.686)
Okay, their strength was well under what we noticed is that they recovered most of their muscle at the end and they recovered, their strength was actually beyond baseline. They were actually stronger, which is weird. Not that much, we're talking about 3%. It's not significant in any way in terms of baseline, but it was a full return to baseline.
Kim Vopni (34:45.489)
So this is the arm of the study of the people who took Pepto-Strong.
Kim Vopni (34:52.388)
But still.
Kim Vopni (34:57.007)
And that was the group that was taking Peptis strong. Wow.
Nora (34:58.862)
taking Pepsi strong. And that was actually a really interesting study that kind of said, okay, now we now let's go off and do more studies. And we did it then. Our chief medical at that time who wasn't our chief medical, he was driving a he was heading a large hospital in Ireland.
We asked him to do a study on an athlete group, placebo and non-placebo, and these are athletes. It's very hard to change and optimize athletes when they're at their top level.
And he, in his words, he set it out to fail. But ultimately, what we've seen is a significant improvement in their strength, their powers, so they could do a lot more, a lot longer, and they recovered much faster. And this is all tied down to the mechanisms we looked after. So that is reduction of inflammation, that's the recovery part. And then the strength build and
and being able to do a lot more in your day, and this is for general public, than you would, and a lot more energy. So higher energy, higher strength, higher power. And that was the second trial. And then the third is when we started introducing women. We didn't introduce because we wanted to, at the beginning, we wanted to focus on understanding the mechanism.
of how the ingredient worked. In the third trial, we introduced women, which was great. I'm a big, massive supporter of that. And that one was to understand the impact it has overall, both women and men, because you know a lot of things can work in men, but don't work in women at all.
Nora (36:49.846)
And we saw exactly the same results. But on top of that, we saw a significant improvement in bone density, which we weren't expecting. was kind of like a, and like I mentioned to you, there's a significant correlation. They don't know why it might be mechanical between the health of your muscle and the health of your bone. And the recovery or the optimization of bone density that we saw in very little time in two months was equivalent to what you would get.
in I think two years of consumption of vitamin D and calcium together. So that was really interesting to see. We don't know why again, we think it's probably mechanical from the strength, but we double the women's strength in the clinical. And that is huge. That's not something you can understand.
Kim Vopni (37:37.147)
Wow. What was the population?
Nora (37:41.001)
The population of that one was about think 60 or 75 on the last one. I think it was 75 or so. I do believe so Kim.
Kim Vopni (37:50.321)
75 people and what age range were were the women in particular do you remember?
Nora (37:55.47)
I think it was age range went from 35 to 55, I believe so, that age range. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And another thing we did to the clinicals, but there's also all the mechanistic work in terms of publications we've done when we look at aging cells and we literally built a model.
Kim Vopni (38:05.103)
Yep. So some would have been in the post-menopausal range, some in the, yep, yep. That's very, very cool.
Nora (38:23.027)
in the lab, complete new model of aged cells versus yolk cells. And it's interesting to see the differences. Like it's striking. Some of the results have been published. A lot of them are going to be published. The difference of how they respond to what you give them. So for example, leucine is a good example. Leucine is an activator of muscle synthesis.
Kim Vopni (38:52.815)
It's an amino acid. Yeah.
Nora (38:52.846)
natural activator, it's an amino acid, it works on young cells, it doesn't work on old cells. So that's why protein to elderly or to anyone above a certain age, potentially even 45 upwards, may not work at all as well as... So comparing young to old is actually there's a massive difference. So
Kim Vopni (38:59.922)
really?
Kim Vopni (39:08.516)
Interesting.
Kim Vopni (39:14.705)
Yeah.
Nora (39:15.328)
We showed that with Peptis-Chong though, there's no difference. It would work on elder. And those are the publications that some have been submitted. Some are in the works to be submitted, but there are some really interesting results because the understanding of the differences that exist, metabolic differences, also reactive difference, how the cell reacts to different stimuli.
between old and young in skeletal muscles still pretty unknown.
Kim Vopni (39:48.433)
That is super fascinating. Wow. So final kind of part on this pep to strong and then I want to talk also about the pep to sleep that you have as well. But when so five years, little over five years ago, I went through a pelvic surgery and during that time, it really made me aware of
Nora (39:50.701)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (40:10.511)
the condition that people are going into their surgery with. So many people with pelvic floor dysfunction are often offered surgery. Sometimes they're only offered surgery. Sometimes they may have done other things along the way, but nonetheless, many people go into their surgery, not having root causes necessarily addressed, but also very deconditioned. Many women we know even from research stop exercising because of their pelvic floor. So that brought, you know, kind of
emphasize this need that we need to get the pelvic floor optimized so women can do the things that are going to offset age-related muscle loss so that they're going to help with their bones and so they can go into like I always say like we need to train for our surgery we need to make sure we recover properly and then rebuild afterwards so my mind now is also thinking this is incredibly powerful for that group of people especially who maybe they can't do certain
of the exercise like certain harder core exercises, at least initially prior to the surgery, of course, I'm going to be having them do their pelvic floor muscle training. But another tool to leverage the strength we have the ability to recover better, the energy generation, even when we are now potentially well, we will be facing bed rest, hopefully for not a huge amount of time, but my mind's kind of
Nora (41:34.061)
Yes.
Kim Vopni (41:35.995)
blowing about that a little bit. Yeah, yeah.
Nora (41:38.092)
Yes, yes. ultimately, like we're talking muscle is muscle throughout the body. Where it's located is irrelevant. optimizing its use is important. From a pelvic floor, you mentioned, everyone's talking about core, core, core, core, but what does it actually mean? How do we optimize it effectively?
And it's not just about pouring more protein and exercising. There's a lot more people can do. Yeah.
Kim Vopni (42:11.569)
Right. And yes. Yeah. Yeah. Super fascinating. Okay. So the next one in the lineup that has been released is Peptisleep. So we've gone through what peptides, we understand that part of it. What is Peptisleep sourced from and what are the benefits of this peptide for humans, for people?
Nora (42:35.402)
Yeah, so pepti sleep is a set of peptides from rice bran. again, was our technology, our AI technology went out to discover what is the best source for a peptide that would have that effect. The story really started with us looking at sleep as a big problem, like with muscle. That was our first...
problem that we identified that hadn't didn't have really a solution to it today that really solved it at its core.
We did the same with sleep. Sleep is an interesting area because, especially since COVID, a lot of people are really focused on it. And now with the whole longevity movement, there's clarity and clearer link between the quality sleep and how well you sleep with your longevity and how you feel every single day and how much you can perform, et cetera. And obviously there's different parts of our life cycle where we sleep less. can be, a lot of it is connected to internal.
but a lot of it also is connected to external. A lot of it is hormonal, a lot of it can be external, heat, temperature, stress, and so forth. And so we started looking into it as, a major problem since COVID even more, because people are more more aware of it, seems there's a lot more stress on people as well. And the world has become so fast. this, it's...
where it's yeah it's become so fast that people cannot keep up and it causes a lot of
Nora (44:14.112)
stress. So we looked at it as a stress sleep kind of linker because they're both connected and one is causing the other. And we looked at different mechanisms, biological mechanisms, and we looked at one called the orexin receptor, which is, it's in the peripheral system. It's a receptor that once you, if you stop it, if you kind of inhibit it,
it reduces cortisol production. And cortisol is one of our major stress hormones, which by the way, counterbalances melatonin. So if you look at our cycle in general, it's kind of like a cycle of melatonin and cortisol throughout the day. And usually at night, cortisol comes down, your melatonin is up.
But very often that cycle is not in whack because you're melatonin, you're too stressed, your cortisol is too high, and as such it impacts directly your sleep. So we wanted to identify a peptide in nature that could actually modulate that receptor, that orexin receptor, and identify a way to
Kim Vopni (45:03.494)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (45:26.678)
to reduce its activity so that cortisol comes down. And that's what we went on the basis of. we searched, we found that...
Rice brand had potentially peptides in it. We started from scratch. We tried to access the peptide, like I said, meaning release it or release it from the protein itself, test it in the lab, do preclinical work, and we identified some really, really good results on the peptides. And then we did our first human clinical last year, and our second is ongoing today. And the first one was literally saying, does it work in humans?
Kim Vopni (46:05.361)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (46:06.2)
it work in human and what's the potential of this and what we started doing Kim as well is that as the wearable industry has now dramatically advanced and is advancing at huge speed and people are adopting wearables a lot more.
people's choices are going to be driven by what the wearable tells them rather than marketing and branding. so the, the, this is why we, started introducing wearables in our clinicals because we want to see the difference on a wearable. Obviously you're going to feel it because you sleep better, but if people see it and their results of the wearable results, it's really more impactful as well. And people will use it again and they know it's working. It's not.
Kim Vopni (46:25.529)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (46:37.947)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (46:50.55)
It's not, you know, pray for the best. Hopefully it works. It literally is analytical. So we looked at the four major phases of sleep in the clinical. We basically ran a proper sleep, like a normal sleep clinical, where you look at how fast you fall asleep, how long you stay asleep, how wakeful you are in the morning, how your concentration, your...
And we tested that. also, in parallel, we looked at the biosensor with, we did a ring, a sleep ring, and we monitored the REM, monitored deep sleep, and we monitored heart rate variability, which is connected directly to stress. And we showed on and on, which is really interesting, that...
Kim Vopni (47:35.057)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (47:39.276)
people sleep longer. Now it doesn't mean you don't wake up when the alarm goes off, but in the period of time you usually sleep, you have more sleep and you have higher REM and higher deep sleep. And that was really, for us, we were super excited. Now we always go into a clinical hoping it'll work. Given the background we have in the AI system.
the risk of it not working in clinical is always lowered, but it's still a clinical, it may fail. you go to clinical, clinical may show that the ingredient doesn't work, but in this case, it showed incredible efficacy in terms of people slept more. They felt complete when you wake up, you're woken up and they felt more concentrated during the day to do the tasks they need to do. And there was no drug in us.
Kim Vopni (48:13.222)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (48:34.574)
But also one of the biggest drops we saw was actually there was a 30 % more heart rate variability, meaning less stress. And that is huge. So people felt, you feel calmer. It's just, I'd explain it as hard, but you do feel a lot kind of more calmer.
Kim Vopni (48:51.792)
Right.
Nora (48:59.156)
And that was an interesting, that was the first study. And now we're repeating that study with a much larger cohort and adding more other things we want to measure in.
Kim Vopni (49:16.559)
measure. Yeah.
Nora (49:17.452)
well, and that should end sometime this year as well. And we will share some of those results. The sleep ingredients on the market, we have like so many customers sending us their reports, whether they're using a watch or a ring. And it's interesting to see some of the impact and people, know,
Kim Vopni (49:33.841)
Mm-hmm.
Nora (49:42.478)
It's always interesting to see individuals saying, know, haven't slept three nights in a row for like years and I feel much calmer, much better. So that's kind of some of their feedback on the pep-tee sleep ingredient, which is great.
Kim Vopni (49:56.79)
very very cool yeah I'm excited to try that I I I've never loved wearables to be completely honest but I I did I have jumped on the bandwagon I use one that it syncs with a certain scale that I have if anybody's interested you can message me I don't have any affiliation with them but I
I was always curious what would my, what's my sleep like? What is my HRV? I was actually, my sleep scores are really quite good. My HRV was very high. I think of my friends and colleagues who always are trying to get their HRV, a higher HRV is actually what you're going for. You want a higher HRV. And people would always say their HRV is so low. And so I kind of felt like I would be in the same boat, but I have really quite good HRV. But this past week I've noticed I've been traveling.
I was going through a little bit of stress because I was speaking and felt a little bit nervous, wasn't exercising, I was different time zones, you know, all the things and my HRV, didn't, I wouldn't say it tanked, but it definitely didn't, it wasn't what it normally is. Obviously, disrupted sleep, not exercising. So when I'm in a really good rhythm, when I'm in my normal exercise and you know, I have a pretty good sleep, wake time and it's good. I'm gonna be, now I have got lots of data without.
Nora (50:58.254)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nora (51:12.366)
That's cool. Yeah, yeah. If you're already there, that's great. But I, yeah, I highly recommend it. It's interesting, the heart rate variability aspect of it, and the calmness people have. But you seem very calm naturally, That's one of the observations I had when I met you. Like, okay, very calm. That's good. It's actually perfect. Yeah.
Kim Vopni (51:12.933)
pep to sleep, now I get to try it and see what happens after that.
Kim Vopni (51:28.379)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kim Vopni (51:35.441)
In the day, I guess.
Kim Vopni (51:41.325)
Yeah, yeah, cool. Well, this has been super fascinating and thank you for creating Peptis strong. I love it. I take it. I recommend everybody in my community take it. I think again, some people are still even like what's creatine and is this safe? And now I'm introducing this word Peptis strong. So this is going to be something that will live within our within like on our sales pages to help educate people because I do think it is so powerful. And as you say, I think everybody
Nora (51:49.464)
Thank you.
Kim Vopni (52:10.967)
everybody truly would benefit from being on this. If you're interested in aging powerfully and well, I think it's really essential. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. I so appreciate it.
Nora (52:11.092)
yeah, Absolutely.
Nora (52:18.222)
100%. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Kim. Thanks a million for inviting me.
