Arzeda Is Synthesizing A Sweeter And Healthier World, One Engineered Enzyme At A Time

If you have ever sifted through a collection of sugar packets at a café or restaurant to sweeten your coffee or tea, chances are you have encountered Stevia. This sugar substitute is derived from the Stevia rebaudiana plant and is known for being a “zero-calorie” sweetener. Its potential for its mass industrial production was unlocked when in 1931 French chemists isolated the molecules — called glycosides — that make it sweet. Glycosides generally describe a class of molecules where a chemical “group” of sugar (or glucose) is connected to another “functional group” such as an oxygen and a hydrogen already bonded together, and the golden standard glycoside for today’s Stevia sweeteners is called Rebaudioside A, or Reb A.

Reb A is the sweetest and most stable glycoside that can be extracted from the plant in its relative abundance, but it often can leave a seemingly unnatural or slightly bitter aftertaste. As with most things in nature, Reb A is not the only type of steviol glycoside, nor do the different types all have the exact same properties; Reb M and Reb D are two other such molecules that taste much more like traditional sugar, with the small but significant catch that they occur in incredibly low concentrations and so are extremely expensive and difficult to extract at scale.

“If taste is king, but at the end of the day you’ve got to be able to put it into a formula that works for the consumer, how do you do that?” asks Alexandre Zanghellini, co-founder and CEO of Arzeda, known as The Protein Design Company™. Today, the Seattle-based company has an answer to its CEO’s question: leveraging the power of computation and biology to engineer the tools to convert ever-present Reb A into the elusively desirable Reb M and Reb D, rather than mining for the latter two in nature.

For Arzeda, artificial intelligence and computational methods provide a means to “supercharge” what happens in nature every day, Zanghellini explains. Instead of waiting for nature’s slow process of evolving new enzymes for different chemical tasks, the company uses a combination of AI, physical and structural approaches, and in-house expertise to rapidly create their own enzymes with the desired better performance — particularly with an eye for the ability to scale reactions. The platform that brings this workflow together has been refined for over a decade and is coined the Intelligent Protein Design Technology™, making it perfectly poised to tackle the glycoside problem.

Arzeda’s new ProSweet Enzymes are the most notable recent outputs of this platform, engineered to alchemize Reb A to Reb M and D at scale, more efficiently than the equivalent reactions that occur in nature. “If you start with the creation of our enzymes, say 1000 kilos as a fairly small quantity of about one pallet, we or our partners are able to take that and apply it to produce more than 100,000 kilos of Reb M or Reb D,” explains Scott Fabro, Arzeda’s Senior Vice President of Business Development for Food Ingredients. “That efficiency lends itself to better pricing, which opens up more markets, which allows them to continue to fill the need to replace sugar in the market with a better alternative for your sweetener and do it in a more cost-effective way. That’s the benefit that we bring to our market.”

These advances for the sweeteners represent a proof-of-concept for Arzeda’s whole-scale reimagination of what food even is. “At a high level, the way we look at it is that what is food, right? It’s primarily nutrients, fats, carbohydrates and proteins. We have a lot of input from agriculture on fats, proteins, and carbohydrates,” Zanghellini emphasizes. “So being able to leverage enzymes to improve the transformation of these inputs into products that are higher performance — be it the sweetener, fiber, or structured fat — have a lot of value. We see that as a significant opportunity for our core technology.”

Arzeda has already conducted multiple regulatory compliance assessments in both Europe and the United States for Reb M and Reb D; as the regulatory approval process continues, the company is targeting being commercial with their new ProSweet Enzymes for better stevia-based sweeteners in the fall of 2023. Until then, the next time you stir some Stevia into your coffee, just think of the world in which your sweetener choices expand once again — all thanks to some AI-based modern-day alchemy.

Thank you to Aishani Aatresh for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, such as Arzeda, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.