Lithuania’s name is being heard among global innovation leaders - a team of researchers from Vilnius University’s Life Sciences Center (VU LSC) has reached the finals of the prestigious European Patent Office (EPO) competition, Young Investors Prize 2025. Among the top ten finalists - selected from more than 450 candidates worldwide - are Lithuanians Laurynas Karpus, Vykintas Jauniškis, and Irmantas Rokaitis, co-founders of the biotech start-up Biomatter.
The award-nominated innovation was developed at VU LSC’s Institute of Biotechnology, in collaboration with Prof. Rolandas Meškys and Dr. Donatas Repečka. The team created Intelligent Architecture™, an AI-based platform that enables the design of entirely new enzymes from the bottom up, eliminating the need to modify enzymes that already exist in nature.
“We’ve created an enzyme design technology limited only by our imagination. It opens new possibilities for solving 21st-century challenges in health and sustainability,” say the VU researchers.
Traditional enzyme engineering methods typically involve minor changes to existing protein molecules, which limits their adaptability to modern industrial needs. The newly developed platform takes a bottom-up approach, building unique enzymes tailored to various industrial sectors' specific demands.
Combining machine learning, physics-based modeling, and experimental lab testing, the system continuously improves the properties and functions of the enzymes it creates. The result: efficient, easily produced enzymes adapted to specific applications - supporting more effective biologics production, drug development, and sustainable chemical synthesis.
The team began by developing the ProteinGAN algorithm, which demonstrated that generating functional enzymes that do not exist in nature was possible. This breakthrough led to the founding of Biomatter in 2018. In 2024, the company raised €6.5 million in investment to accelerate platform development. Today, the researchers’ enzymes are used across diverse fields - from infant nutrition to gene therapy, vaccine development, and protein engineering. Partners include international companies such as Kirin and ArcticZymes Technologies.
The Young Inventors Prize, awarded by the European Patent Office, honors innovators under 30 whose work contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in health, education, sustainable industry, and environmental protection. This recognition not only strengthens Lithuania’s reputation as a biotechnology country but also highlights the potential of a new generation of scientists to create globally significant innovations.
The competition winners will be announced on June 18, 2025, during a live-streamed awards ceremony in Reykjavík, Iceland.
 |