Nuritas

Nora Khaldi had built a technology “to unlock the power of nature” in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company she founded in 2014, leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to find specific peptides―short chains of amino acids―among the trillions that exist in nature and target them for preventing or treating the onset of disease and preserving health for longer. Khaldi worried that getting certain products to market was taking too long and about the potential distraction caused by doing too many projects to serve very distinct industries. Underlying this was her concern that cash would run short if they tried to do it all. She weighed shutting down Nuritas’s promising early-stage pharmaceutical projects―including one aimed at treating Glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer―to focus on consumer-oriented approaches, like a supplement to improve muscle health and reduce the physical signs of aging. Khaldi contemplated telling her team to cease most of their pharmaceutical work, at least for the time being, and eliminate roles linked to that part of the business.