Plant Peptides with Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller: Rational Wellness Podcast 418

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS

Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller discusses Plant Peptides with Dr. Ben Weitz.

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.]

 

Podcast Highlights

---

Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller is the Chief Medical and Innovation Officer for Nuritas, the world-renowned pioneer in AI-based peptide discovery. The website for Nuritas is Nuritas.com.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

---

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:  Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com.  Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.

Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today our topic is plant peptides, which is a completely new category of nutritional supplements, and we’re here with Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller. Many of us in the functional medicine world, both doctors and patients are aware of peptides, which are signaling molecules similar to hormones that have many effects in the body.  Some of the more common ones prescribed by longevity doctors are BPC 157 growth hormone stimulators like Ilin, Sermorelin, CJC 1295. However, there are a number of commonly used drugs that are also peptides. Insulin is a peptide. This first discovered peptide.  The super popular GLP-1 agonist drugs like ozempic are also peptides, but all of these peptides are derived from animals and generally need to be injected.  But now we have peptides derived from plants, including PeptiStrong, which is derived from fava beans, which has been developed by Nuritas and is taken orally. I became aware of this product because Designs for Health is distributing it, and I’ve been taking it for the last six months to enhance my weight training work workouts, and have been noticing its muscle building effects.

Today we’re joined by Dr. Andy Franklyn-Miller. He is the Chief Medical and Innovation Officer of Nuritas, the world renowned pioneer in AI based peptide discovery, and of course, AI based everything today. Right. Dr. Franklyn-Miller has a PhD in biomechanics. He served in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines for 16 years.  He has extensive experience in working with high profile sports teams and elite performers. He’s published more than 60 peer review papers, so thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Franklyn-Miller.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Ben, it’s an absolute pleasure. And I love the shared enthusiasm about peptides and what they can do for everybody, be it the top performing athlete or in fact almost everyone from hospital all the way through to to everyday performers.

Dr. Weitz: And we’re all looking for an edge. And perhaps these plant peptides are one of the ways we can find that edge.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: You know, you are absolutely right and I think, you know, you allude to it earlier. You know, pharma have discovered a number of peptides that suit their purposes. Although they’re heavily modified, they’re heavily modified for half-life or for function, or for cell penetration.  At Nuritas, what we do wouldn’t be possible without AI. And let me just try and explain that because this is not chat GPT.  This is not a large language model. What we’ve been able to do is shortcut the search and find mission that we would have otherwise by being able to handle huge data sets.  And over the last 10 years at utas, what we’ve been doing is looking at the peptides within various food grade plants, and they exist all over, trillions of them in the plant kingdom.

Dr. Weitz: Do you know what, just for a second, could you just explain to everybody who’s not aware, what is a peptide.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: A hundred percent.  So look, what is a peptide? A peptide is a protein. It’s a short sequence of amino acids, usually somewhere between six and 30. They can be a bit longer, they can be a bit shorter. When we get really small, we talk about small molecules. They’re not peptides anymore. But what these do. These, as you said earlier, they signal, so they upregulate or downregulate pathways in the human body because they’re recognized, they bind into a receptor, and they do something.  And that’s one of the common fallacies.  Often you see peptides with multiple different potential benefits, and that’s tricky because these things are pretty specific. Although insulin as a hormone, as a peptide, or a hormone in the body. It has different effects. They’re up and downstream of its binding and you know, some of the synthetic peptides you were talking about earlier in terms of functional medicine and how they’re prescribed.  There’s often multiple different benefits as given to the same peptide, and we know that can’t be true. There have to be up and downstream effects and secondary effects because the thing about peptides, they work really quickly. They’ve got very short onsets, they’ve got short halve lives, and then they’re broken down to amino acids in the body as normal proteins.  And so these things are very specific and very detailed in their effect.

Dr. Weitz: How did you become interested in researching peptides?  

Dr. Franklyn-Miller:  Well, you know, it’s a funny story. So, so I’m a physician and I was running a large orthopedic clinic and I carried out a human clinical trial for Nuritas with their ingredient, PeptiStrong.  And I was a skeptic, as most physicians are. And I actually set this trial up to fail. It was a trial of 30 adults trained athletes and it was a randomized controlled trial of a placebo or peptistrong looking at power. And we know over the weekend there’s a significant amount of work being done on power as a longevity measure.  It supersedes that of strength or muscle mass alone. We know it’s responsible for about 22% of all cause mortality. So if we can get power, and by that I mean applying strength across a joint angle or a movement we can get those…

Dr. Weitz: essentially being able to lift more weight or lift a weight more times.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: A hundred percent.  At the very basic level, something like a sit to stand test, how many sit to stands can we complete in a period of time?  Or as you say, can we deadlift or power clean a weight off the floor? It’s movement across an angle or a multiple angles if you look at a compound lift, so functional strength really rather than just applied strength.  So they wanted me to look at the ingredient pep strong against placebo to look at the effects of fatigue. So they asked me to induce muscle damage in a bunch of trained athletes, and we did that in a cybex dynamometer. We induced fatigue by a repeated measures protocol one that I would use for elite athletes to judge, let’s say rehabilitation after ACL reconstruction.  We induced muscle damage and fatigue, and then we measured the recovery.

Dr. Weitz: How did you induce muscle damage? Was that with eccentric contractions?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller:  A combination. So we did a concentric, an isometric hold, and an eccentric contraction in leg extension, repeated times across multiple sets.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: And actually, funnily enough, someone recently commented that the dropout rate from screening to test was 30%.  Because trained athletes don’t like that sort of test, not coming day to day. So it was a, it was designed to induce muscle damage, and we looked at the effects at 48 hours and 72 hours after that damaging test comparing Peptistrong, the ingredient, to placebo. And let me just tell you a little about Peptistrong.  You you, as you say came from Fava Beam, but it’s actually a series, it’s a network of peptides within it, so it’s extracted using a production mechanism that’s proprietary to neuro tests. And it contains a group of peptides that upregulate mTOR in protein synthesis, a group of peptides that regulate.

Dr. Weitz: And we’ve heard alot about mTOR as something involved in longevity and even the inhibition of mTOR as being something that could be a benefit to aging and mTOR, as we know. Yeah. Big growth thing.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Yeah. You’ve got the, you’ve got the multimillion dollar question. How can Upregulating mTOR. And also downregulating it, downregulating mTOR be the same thing.  And look, let me tell you the Downregulating mTOR studies are all neurons. So they’re all in mice. [00:09:00] Because the thing with longevity studies, and you know this as well as I do, it’s very difficult to do a longevity study in humans because we lived to live for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. So mice are easy.  The thing about mTOR, if we eat protein. From any source plants or animal? We upregulate, mTOR. The way that happens is leucine and arginine, the two amino acids, they drive mTOR at the top. It’s a little bit like sand into a hopper. You can shovel as much sand in as you like, but the rate limiting step.  mTOR itself, so you can feed protein at the top end, but mTOR is regulated

Dr. Weitz: And by the way, this has led some prominent researchers to say that if you really want to promote longevity, you need to reduce protein intake.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely right

Dr. Weitz: Or in fact, to make it a little more complicated, those same researchers say you want to decrease protein intake until you hit age 60, and then you want to increase protein intake.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely because the critical data here is what do the meta-analyses that the composite studies tell us about muscle mass. Longevity because they’re the studies we really have to reference. Now, that’s where the challenge comes in, because ultimately at that age, and we look at sort of over seventies, the biggest correlation is the more muscle mass you have, the less likely you are to die.  And that’s where the all cause mortality drops really sit. Now that doesn’t work. If you look at the rapamycin mTOR crowd, right? It will tell us we should slow down mTOR. In those circum certain circumstances, I think my advice stands if everything’s right in your life, you’ve got at least 1.3 to two grams per kilogram of body weight, of protein intake.

You’ve got your training life and your sleep sorted, then you can worry about mTOR downregulation. Until that point. It’s very difficult to ignore the meta-analysis evidence, which says more strength, more power, more muscle mass will treat you much better than trying to fiddle around lowering it. And so within Peptistrong, we have a group of peptides that upregulate mTOR.  We’ve also got a group of peptides which will up upregulate ATP production within the cell and another group who work via two gene transcription pathways to prevent muscle breakdown. So it’s not just a purified peptide, it’s a group of peptides. They come from fava bean and we don’t concentrate it.

Why don’t we concentrate? Because we want to be in a category which is not pharma. This is FDA GRAS approved. It has a letter of no objection. And why is that important to us? Well, our mission at Neuritas is to improve the lives of billions of people. We want to improve access. We want to make this, ingredients for food, which everyone can get hold of and everyone can use. And price isn’t the barrier. But also that the effects can be seen by many. And so that’s why our mission isn’t about synthetic peptides. This is all about what we can find within food grade natural sources, and we can treat it in a way that we can unlock the peptides.

Dr. Weitz:  I noticed in some of your articles talking about the inhibition of myokine, which we’ve heard about before, seeing these pictures of these extremely muscular bulls that have no myokine Pro or extremely restricted myokine production. They get just incredible amounts of muscle. Can you men talk a little bit about that as one of the factors.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Well, absolutely. So, Rogen one and Murph one are gene transcription agents which which essentially cause the breakdown of muscle. By inhibiting their action, we can preserve the muscle we have. Now, this is very different from the anabolic effect of. Of mTOR, this is the preservation, and this is where really Peptistrong has a role as maintaining the aging muscle without the need for training.  So this is a a preservation study if you like, a preservation effect. And actually the first clinical trial with Peptistrong looked at just immobilized limbs of 30 subjects in Plaster Paris for an entire week. And then followed them. With just self mobilizing exercise for two weeks afterwards, and then looked at the muscle loss, but also the protein synthesis in the group and found the pep strong group.  Were four times greater at FSR protein synthesis than the placebo, which in that case was milk protein. But to go back to action, one and one. We have peptides that will block or limit the transcription of that. So to prevent the breakdown of muscle so that you’re hanging onto what you have as opposed to just relying on building.  And of course we know that over 60 it becomes a little bit harder to trigger mTOR with, sorry, with leucine and arginine. And so as we age, it’s even more important to hang on to what we’ve got.

Dr. Weitz: Now I’ve seen where you have some studies showing that PEPs strong is more effective, say than whey protein.  What about using PEPs strong with whey protein or with branch chain amino acids or with creatine? Do we know if there’s a synergistic effect of adding some of these compounds together?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. We’ve just finished a paper where we’ve been doing exactly that and I guess it’s synergy and superiority.  What we looked at in cells, in muscle cells was whether or not we could upregulate the ribosomal S6. Assay in the biology lab. So could we measure, and that’s at the bottom end of mTOR because one of the things about Peptistrong, it doesn’t compete with protein, so it’s not fighting at the top end of the arginine leucine.  It’s pulling through a little bit like the hopper. So you can put as much sand in the hopper the as you want. Peptistrong is speeding up the production along the way. So we looked at, compared to Leucine, we looked at Peptistrong compared to HMB, we looked at it compared to whey and also Reine. With Leucine, there was a superiority in both young and old cells, and what was particularly interesting was the superiority in old cells, because obviously as we get that stickiness of mTOR over 60, we Peptistrong worked independent of that stickiness.

So it would still upregulate S six between two and four times greater than leucine alone. When we look at HMB 1.6 times superiority again, so at that phospho S six and a synergistic effect of over 70%, so you could replace or you could combine [00:16:00] when it came down to whey protein. Again, four times superior at S six phosphorylation.  Creatine was really interesting. We know that Creatine is not great at muscle building on its own. It’s very much focused on a TP. The interesting thing with Peptistrong compared to creatine was that we upregulate mitochondrial a TP, unlike that of creatine. So again, we have a synergistic effect of energy.  Of the two together, they don’t beat each other, so Creatine doesn’t beat pep strong. Pep strong doesn’t beat creatine. Obviously outside of that phosphorous six. Really interesting, slightly different mechanisms of action, upregulation of energy, and certainly many of the early adopters of Peptistrong, particularly in Europe, really were formulating as an energy product first rather than that anabolic product second.

Dr. Weitz: Interesting. So the current recommendation is to take four capsules of Peptistrong per day, is that correct?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. It’s 2.4 grams. And there’ve been many questions about can we divide the dose? What’s the best time should you take on an empty stomach?  Certainly the use cases have varied, are all over in and indeed in Brazil,  Where we sell via compounding pharmacists there are far there are physicians who have prescribed much higher doses and also much lower doses. And what we found is that taking it on an empty stomach is certainly superior because these peptides have to be absorbed and they survive the gut.  Within the ingredient itself, there are many peptides that are broken down that protect pep strong. Actual the ingredient parts, which are the active peptides. So taking on empty stomach is optimal and you can certainly divide dose. It doesn’t need to be immediately before training. The way that this is distributed really gives you the benefit whether as long as it’s taken daily at 2.4 grams.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I’ve been taking four capsules in the morning on an empty stomach before I work out, along with branch chain [00:18:00] aminos. And then I usually take something that stimulates nitric oxide at the same time.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely makes an awful lot of sense, and it’s a very nice combination. Commonly what we’ve seen is a lot of people starting to take with creatine and pep strong for their energy synergy effects.

Dr. Weitz: Now I saw that it also helps with bone density or strength as well as muscle strength.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Off. Last clinical was the first clinical we included women. And here we had 60 subjects men and women, and they carried out, they were training novices. They carried out a two month training program three times a week in the gym.  For the first time we monitored their protein intake, so it was matched between the two groups. And we saw that they increased strength by 17% in the Peptistrong group compared to placebo and muscular energy. Interestingly, in this group, and I have to say this wasn’t a part of the clinical trial protocol, we carried out a DEXA scan.  And we saw a [00:19:00] nwt 0.6% shift in bone mineral content in favor of the PeptiStrong group. And it was an observation that we didn’t expect. I can’t absolutely explain how, but that NWT point, 6% shift in bone mineral content really equates to vitamin D in calcium supplementation for a year. So a two month supplementation of Peptistrong has that effect.  I have my thoughts. We looked at a number of bone myokines. Particularly osteo and we saw elevations in osteo, and it makes sense as to how it’s happening, but I can’t yet confirm it. And we haven’t had a second study yet to to show you.

Dr. Weitz: Well, it’s interesting. I recently had Dr. Belinda Beck on the podcast, and she is the only one who’s published studies showing that you could increase bone density with a weight training program.  And she found that you needed to do heavy weight training, like five sets of five reps of exercises like deadlifts and squats, along with some ballistic loading. So it would be interesting you might. Considered trying to see if you can team up with her.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Yeah, AB absolutely. And I think that’s one of, one of the real confounders, like this was a novice exercise program.  It was three sets of eight to 10 reps. When we looked at the training diaries, although we would’ve liked it to be progressive overload, it was far from it. I mean, they were novice exercises, right? They all got stronger, which is good. They all got and obviously the placebo group got stronger.  We’d expect it. But there were significant differences between PeptiStrong and the placebo. We’ve just published that in the British Medical Journal Nutrition Journal. But you are right, typically bone mineral density changes need heavy al load. It’s that compressive load which gives that stimulus for change.  And it would be really interesting to see what we can achieve Peptistrong plus an optimum Regi and I think that’s really where we want to go.

Dr. Weitz: It looks like some amount, as long as it’s tolerated of ballistic loading as well, is seems to be very important for increasing bone.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: A hundred percent.  It’s the it’s the I think you have to put the bone under sufficient stress in order to stimulate that osteoblastic activity, but at the same time, obviously not too much stress. Right. To start to develop stress response. Right.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Weitz: I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but I just want to take a few minutes to tell you about a product that I’m very excited about.  Imagine a device that can help you manage stress, improve your sleep, and boost your focus. All without any effort on your part. The Apollo wearable is designed to just to do just that, created by neuroscientists and physicians. This innovative device uses gentle vibrations to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, helping you feel calmer, more focused, and better rested.  Among the compelling reasons to use the Apollo wearable are that users experience a 40% reduction in stress and anxiety. Patients feel that they can sleep. Their sleep improves up to additional 30 minutes of sleep per night. It helps you to boost your focus and concentration and it’s scientifically backed. And the best part is you can get all these benefits with a special $40 discount by using the promo code Weitz. W-E-I-T-Z, my last name at checkout to enjoy these savings. So go to Apollo Neuro and use the promo code Weitz today. And now back to our discussion.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Weitz:   So I noticed you also have a product for skin called PeptiYouth.  Can you tell us about this peptide?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Peptiyouth is a really interesting peptide. We actually discovered this in the root of the pea  plant and in the root of the pea. It’s this peptides evolved for many years to protect against frost damage. So it exists in the, in its natural state as a protective peptide in that space.  It, what we did was sort of take that identical peptide, synthesize it and see what we could do in skin, because what we found is that it upregulated collagen synthesis. Remarkably well.  And a different effect, obviously then in the p but a beautiful story nonetheless. And we’ve two human clinical trials with pep youth, where we’ve looked at wrinkles at skin hydration at the smoothness of skin and also dark spots.  And found significant improvements in all four. Typically peptides on skin have quite a high inclusion rate. They have to be quite concentrated and delivered in quite high doses. Peptiyouth is effective at 35 parts per million. So it’s a really trace [00:24:00] benefit. Within that with a very nice story of naturality.  One of the really interesting things though, with Peptiyouth is the synergy with retinol with vitamin C, allowing you to use much lower doses of those other compounds, which can often be quite toxic to the skin. So use is a, is an enabler of. Increased activity decreased inflammation, but also enables the effect of retinol in particular to be significantly greater at collagen production.

Dr. Weitz: So speaking of r rates of the type of absorption most of the peptides that are on the market now are injectable. And it’s generally understood that. If if you take them orally, they get broken down into amino acids and much like eating a steak and that they are not that effective.  So how are your peptide products, which are generally taken orally except for this product, which is done transdermally? How [00:25:00] can they be effective, taken orally and or would they be even more effective if they were injected?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: And absolutely Ben, and this is where AI comes in, so, so let me give you an analogy.  If we take a million seconds in time and look backwards, that takes us to last week. If we take a billion seconds and look backwards, it takes us back to 1994. If we take a trillion seconds, takes us back to the early ice age. What AI has enabled us to do at neuro tasks is look at a billion data points across our unique data set of peptides and look at those billion data points within two hours.  It’s that level of our ability to look at data, enables us to find the peptides which will survive the gut. Because if we had to do this by chance, it would take us tens [00:26:00] of years because we would experiment with one. We’d get that far, then we’d find it was degraded. We’d have to look at a different variant and peptides.  As you know, homologs exist in nature, so it might be one or two amino acids different from its parents, but actually a obeys many similarities, but might be much more resistant to the gastric conditions and geal absorption than the parent. If we had to look at all of the homologs for one peptide each time, we wanted to look at a potential ingredient.

We still wouldn’t be here as a company. And so that’s the part that AI has enabled us to unlock. It’s costs a lot of money to build that data set. It’s not, as I was saying earlier, this is not a large language model trained on public data. This is all hand biological lab data that’s been generated firsthand in Dublin and is proprietary.

This data doesn’t exist. You know, if you take a look, start to look at the peptides available. I’ll use a carrot as an example because there’s no, there’s very little in the way [00:27:00] of useful peptides and a carrot. But if we took a carrot and started to try and describe it, it doesn’t exist. We have to start from scratch, so, so the modeling in and around peptides, for example, that will be absorbed in the judge.

We’ve had to do that by hand. We’ve had to start work out which characteristics will absorb, which will be protected. That way when we select an ingredient, and we do this in a number of ways, we might look at an end result. So we might want to block a certain receptor or we might just want to improve muscle health.  We need to be able to select in and select out various categories to be able to get there. And pharma would like to do the same. And we can see now actually some of the oral GLP one agonists appearing that will survive. Those peptides are heavily modified to get there. In our world, we can’t modify.  So we have to find those naturally. And obviously if we can [00:28:00] modify them and get there, we can find them naturally. It’s just at times they’re locked away in nature and need to be unlocked within that plant source.

Dr. Weitz: And of course they’re motivated to modify them anyway ’cause then they can be patented.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Yes.  And that’s again, I guess where we have a similarity in that we’ve been very successful in patenting peptides that we’ve identified. Pep Strong is heavily patented across the world because these peptides, although in nature. Need to be unlocked via a process of that ingredient production that’s again, proprietary to Nuritas.  So these don’t just appear and others have looked at different hydros of Fava Bean and not found the same benefit. So there’s a uniqueness of production, which protects us and has given us patent protection.

Dr. Weitz: I see. So there patented because of the way you came up with them?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. So although they happen to appear in that long language of code within [00:29:00] the.  And probably somebody somewhere in the world has the right digestive enzymes in order to extract them. The way that we do that to make them available is totally unique. And as such, therefore the peptide and the homologous daughters and sons in and around that peptide have been successful for us to gain pattern protection.

Dr. Weitz: That’s kind of interesting ’cause it’s generally thought that. Products that are naturally present in, in our food are not patentable.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. And I think it, you know, if you kind of think of of word puzzles where the words that are hidden away within a mesh of other words until it’s extracted, it’s not a word.  It’s a jumble of letters. Right. And that’s exactly the same here in terms of peptides. It’s a bunch of amino acids in sequence until it’s cut out of its parent. And the way that we do that to produce those ingredients is the unique part of this.

Dr. Weitz: Interesting. Looking at your website, I noticed some of the other peptides that you are talking about, including [00:30:00] you, there’s mention of one for sleep, an anti-diabetic peptide, an anti-aging peptide, and an anti-inflammatory.  Do you want to talk about some of your peptides to come?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. Look the latest release, and we released this just a month ago or so, is pep sleep. Okay. This is a really exciting peptide network which targets the orexin receptors. So the orexin receptors are in the adrenal cortex just above the kidney.  They released cortisol and so rather than like melatonin trying to suppress sleep, what we did here was really try to lower cortisol. And see if we can affect the diurnal rhythm in a much better way. I finished a clinical trial in December and we took 30 subjects, placebo versus 250 milligrams of pep sleep.  And we used the lead sleep evaluation questionnaire. The lead, I think it’s

Dr. Weitz: better if you lean in a little bit. Ah, sorry. Yeah, you get pretty dark to see. Sorry.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Yes.

Dr. Weitz: So, [00:31:00]

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: so again the lead sleep evaluation questionnaire, so. There are two questionnaires in the world measuring sleep that have been validated for clinical studies.  The leads in the Pittsburgh the Pittsburgh is really designed to diagnose a sleep disorder, whereas the pharma world uses the lead sleep evaluation questionnaire for a variety of reasons. We picked the harder the leads. And then what we did was we equipped all of these subjects with aura rings so that we could look at their heart rate variability.  We followed them for two weeks naturally, and then a further six weeks taking placebo or peptic sleep. One of the really exciting things we found was rather than just affect sleep initiation, we affected all four quadrants of sleep. So we improved sleep quality, improved behavior before waking and behavior on waking.  So no hangover effects, no feeling groggy in the morning. We induce sleep faster. The quality of sleep moved significantly up. And we saw the [00:32:00] same with heart rate variability. So again, I’m sure many of our listeners are very familiar about heart rate variability, but in essence it’s our fight or flight.

So if we take our pulse measure, our heart rate, we might average it out across a minute to be 60 beats per minute. But in fact, our electrical activity is jumping from each beat to beat, and it’s called the RRR interval. When we’re super stressed, we’re about to be run over by a truck. Our RR interval narrows, it’s our stress response and it’s driven by cortisol.

When we’re most relaxed, we’ve had the best quality of sleep. Our RR interval is wide. We vary our heart rate variability. And so what we wanted to look at was that as a metric. It’s called R-M-S-S-D, and we saw significant increases in that variability with treatment with pep sleep, and that fits with the measures.  So we had an objective measure. Which is the ring and heart rate variability. We had a subject measure, which was the lead sleep evaluation questionnaire. So we’re really excited about that ingredient. It’s [00:33:00] launching in some pretty early movers and some pretty big sleep specialists across the the us in the months to come.  But totally natural product, no hangover effect, really small dose and certainly comparable in getting to sleep compared to melatonin, but without any of the side effects.

Dr. Weitz: When will practitioners like myself be able to get

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: this I’m pretty sure there’s something coming your way in the next month.

Dr. Weitz: Okay. Yeah. Good good. It’s really

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: exciting. It’s probably one of the most exciting ingredients that we’ve seen certainly in terms of clinical trial results. Having, and it works from the first dose. And in fact, many times I’ve just said, look, it just works. And when we launched it, some of the trial samples that were out there and people came back the same day from, but gimme more.  It’s just it’s just too good.

Dr. Weitz: When it comes to sleep products, people are always afraid, am I gonna build up a tolerance? Should I take it regularly or is it gonna stop working?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. And so, so I think one of the interesting things we saw was there was no tolerance. After six [00:34:00] weeks of everyday use, I.  So it wasn’t that the effect started to wear off. It wasn’t effect, you know, it didn’t seem to build any form of resistance. And we followed the subjects for a week after the trial and they didn’t seem that there was any dependency. So, so people weren’t coming back, needing to take their capsules a again.  Currently it’s formulated as a gummy, it’s formulated as a ready to drink shot and a capsule. Obviously the, our customers are formulating in. All sorts of end formulations with this.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. And we’ve been talking about athletic performance and you mentioned heart rate variability. And decrease in heart rate variability means that an athlete will not be recovering from his workouts as well.  So if this increases heart rate variability, then not only are they gonna be sleeping, but they’re gonna better recover from their workouts.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: I absolutely bet, and you know, it’s one of the things that actually a lot of the, a lot of the athletic brands are starting to [00:35:00] notice and start starting to talk about bringing out ranges that are devoted to that whole performance, recovery and sleep being that critical element.  I’m surprised many haven’t already actually, because, you know, if you think about it in terms of all round recovery. It’s pretty well known and pretty well adopted that sleep is the critical moment, I guess in many cases. There’s no new ingredient until pep sleep to really fulfill that window without getting it into pharma.  And I think that maybe that was the problem but certainly I think we’ll see an explosion of use. In and around that recovery, get ready to perform space that, that people are really keen to look at.

Dr. Weitz: Now, there are specialized ways to increase absorption of nutrients taken orally. So in, in our space, there’s particular companies and scientists who have perfected how to do liposomal formulations, and there’s various ways to try to [00:36:00] increase absorption. Is that something that’s beneficial for these peptides or are they already absorbed at a pretty high level?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: It’s a great question, Ben, and I’m gonna say watch this space.  So it’s something we’re looking at right now in terms of peptides, and it’s interesting if we look at probiotics and the gut flora, you know, we’ve all seen that explosion of product on the market, about improving gut health, improving digestive health absorption, leaky gut. And then the timing of supplements.

One of the interesting things is outside of having more bacteria or a broader diversity of bacteria, not much has happened in that space. And when you look at the clinical trials in terms of around, do they make us healthier very often, it’s pretty non-specific. We don’t really know what having more of those bacteria do outside and make us feel a bit better.

And we’ve been looking at into that space quite a lot. And what we find [00:37:00] is many of those probiotics, their actual mechanism of action is peptide derived so that there are peptides delivering. The leaky gut or the rate of absorption across geal cells. So it’s a fascinating area that we’re looking at the moment, not only about the increased absorption of our own ingredients, but also how peptides can increase absorption.  Or in some cases decrease the rate of absorption. Well, that’s it.

Dr. Weitz: A lot of times you don’t want it absorbed until it gets into the colon, for example, where most of the microbiome is. And that’s a big issue. How do we keep these probiotics from getting broken down in the stomach and somehow staying intact until they get into the large intestine?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely right. And you know, it reminded me of many years ago, I. My, my background training is sport and exercise medicine. And I never really used to go to the sport and exercise medicine conferences and people would say, why? They go, well, I’m not gonna learn anything really from here.  It’s [00:38:00] regurgitation of fact from elsewhere. And I would favor the sort of the European Immunology Conference or the Japanese cardiology conference because. There you find clues that you can bring back to your own space. And I think that’s really what we’re looking at. We are an ingredient company.

Identifying ingredients for use in all of the NCD health verticals where we want to improve access. I. But the answers don’t lie necessarily in peptides themselves, but in other areas of medicine that we can take and say, well look, can we find a peptide which will regulate this process? And then can we find it from our own library?

And that’s really the thing that’s exciting. You know, my job in some ways is relatively easy. I have to produce two new ingredients a year. One at the side, one at the end run them through clinical trials. Currently, our success rate with magnifier, our AI platform is 80% successful at identifying a peptide or a set of peptides that have a function that we can track.  And our clinical trial success in the last [00:39:00] 18 months has been a hundred percent. So, so I’ve got a embarrassing wealth. Of peptides and potential functions. My, my biggest challenge is what not to develop rather than what to develop.

Dr. Weitz: Very exciting. If you want to team up with somebody on the liposomal front, the guy to talk to is Chris Shade, who runs the Quick Silver Scientific.  He seems to be the expert at being able to properly design a liposome. Liposomal.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Yep. Sounds fascinating.

Dr. Weitz: What about the anti-aging peptide?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: A little bit ring-fenced in, in what I can say. Okay. It’s a collaboration with a a large company. So I’m a little hamstrung. What I can tell you is our glucose peptides.  So this peptide network is gonna come out later in the year. It is a pretty clever set of peptides aimed at really trying to lower the gi. Impact of food. So, so we know that high circulating levels of [00:40:00] sugar cause inflammation, that secondary effect can co go on to cause cardiovascular disease.  And. Also, we know that actually you can make some high and low GI choices in your diet, but they’re exclusion choices. You know, you are deciding not to eat carbohydrates, or you are deciding to avoid your favorite snack or your favorite breakfast or favorites. I mean, because you’re aware of the health consequences,

Dr. Weitz: correct.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: And so we, we have a network of peptides that approach this in two different ways. One of those network are DPP four inhibitors. And so they affect the breakdown of glucagon in the liver and insulin production. On the other hand, we have a network of glute four uptake peptides, which will drag glucose into muscle cells.  And so the two balance out pretty well and really are showing us, and this is hot off the press Ben, that, that I don’t think we’ve said it yet, is that we get about a 10% reduction in average blood sugar. [00:41:00] From one dose. So you can have that one dose with your meal of the day and reduce the immediate impact of glucose.  But that one dose will also give you a 10% reduction in glucose across the board day on day. And we carried out a pretty big trial, 120 subjects over in India at the end of last year. Looking at the effects of pep control across a pretty carbohydrate heavy diet. You know, we wanted it in challenging conditions.

And so we’re pretty confident with this data that looks good. And really what it’s doing is changing the GI impact of your food. So you can have more choice, you can be less exclusive. And to put that in perspective, if we were to look at Metformin, a common drug used to treat. Type two diabetes bt, or an early metabolic syndrome, it might reduce your average daily blood sugar by 25%.

Pretty significant. And obviously if you are healthy and you’re not pre-diabetic, that’s pretty dangerous. You can get some very low hypoglycemic episodes. [00:42:00] So a 10% shift is a nicely and a nice, safe bracket, but it’s high enough to make quite an impact. When we look at the effects of the glycosides, the other, sort of the sulfonylureas, those drugs again that are used to treat type two diabetes, they normally make a sort of one to three milli mo difference in blood sugar, and we’re pretty comparable to those.

So a pretty effective ingredient from once a day that can have an in important effect on lowering that blood sugar, but also giving you more choice in the diet. One of the things I guess that everyone gets excited about is GLP one. And one of the things about DP four, if you inhibit that enzyme, you elevate GLP one, and so therefore you get an indirect effect, but also you get a feeling of fullness, which is a win-win.  Now, obviously, we’ll never get the same effect as a semaglutide. A natural ingredient. You know, it’s incredibly heavily modified that the normal half-life of GLP one is about an hour. [00:43:00] Whereas with semi glutamate, it’s, they’ve managed to get it out to a week, which is pretty impressive, right? So, you know, we’re not gonna get that sort of level of performance, but certainly an elevation of GLP one reduces hunger, increases that feeling of society, so gives us a good room for building off.

Dr. Weitz: We think metformin works through its action on the microbiome. Do these peptides also work through the microbiome?

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Not specifically. They’re very much DPPP4 and Glute4 focused one of and there’s

Dr. Weitz: glute four and DPP four drugs already on the market right

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: there. There are absolutely, and they’ve certainly gone out of fashion now with the GLP one agonists.  And you know, as you alluded to earlier, you know, as those patterns. Fall off. There are much less attractive target and there are much more attractive targets that can be on and off site. And that’s just the way pharma works. Right. You know, neuro is about. It’s about access. It’s [00:44:00] about legacy ingredients really that will form a part of food.  And one of the reasons that Dr. Nora Kdi founded neuro tasks was she saw the lack of innovation in food. And part of it is the return on investment. You know, it’s to develop a new ingredient is risky. The chances of success are low. And. The rewards are relatively modest because these ingredients ultimately have to be cheap to be incorporated.  If it’s in your bagel or it’s within your past or your noodle as well as being a supplement it can’t be incredibly expensive. And so that’s one of the challenges here is that we want to be able to create ingredients that aren’t astronomically expensive. That can be accessed in multiple different ways.  But of course the first to market companies, the ones that have fast moving SKUs and have developed a educated audience are the ones to first take,

Dr. Weitz: right? And then of course if it has a positive effect on blood [00:45:00] glucose potentially it may have a anti-cancer effect as well.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. And I think, you know, the, one of the exciting angles we have there is we launched last year. It’s a soft launch is Pep Protect Again, it’s a skin topical peptide. It works via a totally unique mechanism of action. There’s a skin receptor called Panex in one. And what happens when sunlight UVB hits the panex in one channel, it opens and releases a TP which then triggers sun damage on the skin.  And we looked within Marine Micro adi, and within that space there is a. A peptide which protects sun damage in marine microalgae, and rather amazingly, it has the same effect in humans. And so that peptide blocks the panex in one channel and stops that a TP release within U-V-A-U-V-V-U-V-C.

Sunlight and I think we’ve not yet looked, but that [00:46:00] could really be one of our most exciting advances. By being able to block that panex in one channel we need to look and certainly we’re working with some pretty big global universities on. The possibility for it to prevent the development of benign pigments into melanoma and what we can do in skin cancer prevention.  So certainly there’s the, whilst we might have looked there initially for its beauty effect there’s a much more potentially impactful effect there as cancer prevention.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. This is all very exciting.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely. As I say, it’s an embarrassment of riches on where to look. And and I think, you know, focus is one of our big challenges.  You know, we have so many peptides that, that come through magnify our AI platform that, that really, we’re really trying to pick the ones with the most impact first. That can benefit more people.

Dr. Weitz: It’s interesting, we talk a lot about AI and its benefits and this is really only possible through ai.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely because as I say, you know, it would take us tens and tens of years [00:47:00] to find the combinations of peptides that both survive, but also have a positive impact. And we’d be lost in this preclinical work for the next three or four years alone, looking at one peptide, let alone the bulk. Right.

Dr. Weitz: Great. So there’s been a fascinating talk. Any final thoughts you wanna leave our listeners and viewers and and where should they look to find out about getting ahold of these peptides? I.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely Ben. I think, you know, look, we are gonna produce two new ingredients a year. We’re focused completely on those NCD categories.  You know, gut is very high on our list. Blood lipids is very high on our list. You can imagine along with inflammation. And so, look out for pep control later in the year. And certainly designs for health have been very, quick to market with a lot of these peptides. They have an inside track on what’s coming next.

Cool. In that medical practitioner channel our end goal is food. And you’ll see quite an exciting [00:48:00] launch probably early 26 in an everyday staple where neuro peptides are emerging as a first health promoting ingredient in something. We all eat almost every day. Which is desperately exciting.

Dr. Weitz: So this is what we call a functional food.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely right. And you know, in many respects the Japanese and the Koreans have been doing this for years in terms of functional foods. And it’s really exciting to see this sort of head west and become accepted as truly food is medicine. You know, we often talk about restrictions being food is medicine, but the for the first opportunity to really incorporate food is medicine as a new ingredient with clinical trial evidence showing its benefit incorporated in is incredibly exciting.  Nuritas.com is where all of our latest information will be. And and absolutely. And Ben I’ll look out to, I get some samples of PeptiSleep your way.

Dr. Weitz: That sounds great. I appreciate that.

Dr. Franklyn-Miller: Absolutely.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast.  For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcast or Spotify and give us a five star readings and review. As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition and want to prevent chronic problems and wanna promote longevity, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111 and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine and I will talk to everybody next week.