Humanity's favourite legal addiction, sugar, is perhaps the leading cause of death in the world. Responsible for the development of numerous diseases, including deadly cardiovascular defects, claiming over 18 million lives a year.

The current chemical method we use to treat this, artificial sweeteners, is not much of an improvement. They have been linked to numerous health issues, not to mention aspartame earning a carcinogen warning by the WHO earlier this year. These factors have drastically driven down their mass adoption, and has allowed sugar-related deaths to continue to grow.

Our project aims to develop sweet proteins, a class of proteins that interacts with the tongue in the same way that sugar does, but digesting in the same way a protein would in the stomach. It is a sweetener that puts health first before anything else, and we see it as the final frontier of sweetener science. We have the opportunity to put a major dent in the deaths caused by sugar, and drastically increase the healthspan of humanity.