In an exciting development for the food and beverage industry, protein discovery startup Shiru has joined forces with Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition Partners, a subsidiary of the global ingredients giant Ajinomoto, to pioneer the development and commercialization of sweet proteins. These high-intensity natural sweeteners, found in fruits and berries from equatorial regions, promise to revolutionize sugar replacement in various products without impacting blood glucose levels.
Natural sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit have made significant strides in recent years, but sweet proteins add a compelling new dimension to the sugar reduction toolkit. According to Dr. Jasmin Hume, founder and CEO of Shiru, these proteins can be up to 5,000 times sweeter than sugar and offer a unique advantage in the quest for healthier sweetening options. However, the journey to harnessing these proteins has not been without its challenges.
The primary hurdles have been identifying proteins with the right kind of sweetness—free from issues like delayed onset, lingering aftertaste, or stability problems—and developing cost-effective production platforms to scale them. Typically, these platforms involve microbial fermentation, though some companies are exploring the possibility of expressing these proteins in corn.
Shiru’s recently launched Flourish platform is at the forefront of this endeavor. This first-of-its-kind discovery platform and marketplace for proteins is being leveraged in the partnership with Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition Partners to identify sweet proteins that meet both criteria. “There are about a dozen known sweet proteins out there, but not all of them are perfect,” Hume explained. “Some have issues such as delayed onset or lingering aftertaste, or they may not maintain their structure or potency after processing.”
Shiru’s hypothesis is that many more sweet proteins exist in nature, but finding them requires the right tools. “This is a great testbed for our Flourish technology,” Hume said. “We have the biggest database of natural proteins in the world and the tools to mine that database. We’re looking for proteins that are both sweet and potentially more stable and easier to formulate with than the ones we already know about.”
Achieving cost-effective production is the second part of the equation. Shiru’s platform can identify how likely a protein is to be expressed in a manufacturable way, which is crucial for scaled production. “We’re throwing all of our tools at this problem to identify sweet proteins that are not only high performance but can also be scaled up,” Hume noted. Ajinomoto, with its world-class expertise in fermentation and ingredient formulation, provides the perfect complement to Shiru’s capabilities.
While patenting a protein sequence found in nature is not possible, Shiru can patent the application of that sequence in novel ways. This partnership allows Shiru to license the technology to Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition Partners for well-defined categories within food and beverage. This approach not only generates immediate revenue for the startup but also holds the promise of downstream value through licensing and royalties as the ingredients scale up.
Shiru, which had to undertake layoffs at the end of 2023 to conserve cash, sees partnerships like this as critical to monetizing its technology. “This is the first partnership we’re announcing, but we have others in the works with global corporations,” Hume revealed.
Shiru’s ProteinDiscovery.ai tool, accessible via a simple web interface, allows users to search a database of over 33 million molecules by protein sequence, functional use, and successful expression. Customers can approach Shiru with a problem statement, and the company can identify solutions using its proprietary machine learning methods. One standout feature of the platform is the ‘Expressor’ tool, which predicts protein expression in microbial systems, ensuring that the discovered proteins can be produced cost-effectively.
This collaboration between Shiru and Ajinomoto marks a significant step forward in the quest for natural, high-intensity sweeteners, leveraging cutting-edge technology to bring healthier options to the market.