Lithuanian scientists transform enzyme engineering with AI

Euronews

13-06-2025

Enzymes are the hidden machinery behind many of today's medical, industrial, and environmental advances – but conventional enzyme design methods have reached their limits. That's where Laurynas Karpus (30), Vykintas Jauniškis (29), and Irmantas Rokaitis (28) come in.
These Lithuanian innovators have pioneered an AI-powered platform that generates custom enzymes from scratch, free from the limitations of nature's templates. Thanks to their groundbreaking invention, they were named among the top ten Tomorrow Shapers in the European Patent Office's 2025 Young Inventors Prize.
Their tool, developed through their company Biomatter, is known as the Intelligent Architecture™ platform. It doesn't just tweak what nature already offers – it creates entirely new enzymes designed for specific industrial and medical uses.
'By creating the technology for new enzyme design that is only limited by our imagination, we are unlocking a key bottleneck in solving health and sustainability problems in the 21st century,' the trio said in a joint statement.
The platform combines machine learning, physics-based modeling, and experimental testing to continuously improve its enzyme outputs. The result? Scalable, efficient, and highly tailored biological tools that can accelerate everything from drug development to green chemistry.
The journey began in 2017 at the Institute of Biotechnology at Vilnius University, where the trio collaborated on early AI enzyme-generation models. One of their first breakthroughs was ProteinGAN, a machine-learning model that demonstrated the feasibility of generating novel, functional enzymes. That success led them to co-found Biomatter in 2018 alongside scientists Rolandas Meškys and Donatas Repečka.
Biomatter has since partnered with biotech leaders like Kirin, to produce Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMOs) – essential nutrients for infant health – and with ArcticZymes Technologies, to develop better enzymes for gene therapy, vaccine manufacturing, and bioprocessing.
'Our goal is to make enzyme engineering faster, cheaper, and to solve a problem that couldn't be solved before,' says Rokaitis, emphasising Biomatter's ability to meet specific industry needs beyond traditional engineering in the field. 'Each enzyme we build has the potential to revolutionise that specific part of the industry and make it much more sustainable,' Karpus adds.
Their work comes at a pivotal time. With the enzyme market expected to grow from €10 billion in 2025 to €15 billion by 2034, the need for next-generation enzyme solutions is critical. What's more, the Lithuanian team's innovation supports United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – specifically SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure).
Biomatter's AI-engineered enzymes aren't just a scientific advance – they're a promise of a more adaptive and sustainable future.
For Karpus, this future – and our approach to it – is as much about mindset as it is about science: 'My advice to younger generations would be to not be afraid of building, because the future is not set in stone: the future is what you make of it.'
'Forever chemicals' may be taking their toll on our health before we are even born, new research suggests.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a group of chemicals used in everyday products like food packaging and non-stick cookware. They're known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't degrade easily and can build up in the environment – and in our bodies.
Scientists have detected PFAS in people's blood, breast milk, semen, livers, and even brains. They suspect these chemicals harm human health, with studies linking them to higher cholesterol, some cancers, and fertility problems, among other issues.
The new research adds another complication to that list: high blood pressure during adolescence.
The analysis followed more than 1,000 children in the US. It used maternal plasma collected shortly after they were born to identify their level of prenatal PFAS exposure, and matched it to doctors' records up until their 18th birthdays.
Prenatal exposure to PFAS was linked to a higher risk of developing high blood pressure later in childhood, particularly in the teenage years, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The findings indicate that 'these forever chemicals can have long-lasting and potentially harmful effects that may only become apparent years after birth,' Zeyu Li, the study's lead author and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in the US, said in a statement.
The risk of elevated blood pressure was even higher for boys and Black children with higher PFAS levels at birth, the study found.
In a surprise to researchers, a handful of forever chemicals were actually linked to lower diastolic, or bottom number, blood pressure in early childhood, though that changed when they entered their teenage years.
Evidence on the health effects of PFAS has been mixed so far.
While researchers believe these chemicals pose risks, it's difficult to pinpoint their exact impact because there are thousands of PFAS that could all interact in different ways, and because people's exposure changes over time.
Even so, Li said the latest study underscores the need for researchers to track people's health and their PFAS levels over a long period of time, from early childhood to adolescence and beyond.
Meanwhile, Mingyu Zhang, the study's senior author and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said stronger environmental protections are needed to protect people from PFAS, given they are so ubiquitous that people cannot meaningfully limit their exposure on their own.
That could include phasing out forever chemicals from consumer products and in industrial settings, he said, as well as better surveillance and limits on PFAS in water systems.
'This is not something individuals can solve on their own,' Zhang said.