Conversations Unplugged
with Shawn Wells
Shawn Wells has helped bring roughly 40 new ingredients to market, with individual developments requiring years of research and millions of dollars. Now, he’s using AI to dramatically accelerate that process. In this conversation with STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer Christian Drapeau, Shawn shares how a database of nearly 1,000 ingredients and advances in molecular analysis are helping him identify promising compounds faster, opening a new chapter in the work that has consumed him for decades.
Shawn Wells
That career began somewhere entirely different. Shawn was studying business while struggling with obesity, depression, disordered eating, and other health challenges when exercise and nutrition began changing his life. Fascinated by what he was learning, he told a doctor about his growing passion. The doctor drew a lifeline from his twenties to old age and asked him a simple question: “Why not be happy between here and here?” For Shawn, it was permission to choose a different path. He went on to spend roughly eight more years in school, eventually becoming a biochemist, dietitian, and formulator.
That same curiosity still drives his work today. Shawn describes evenings, weekends, holidays, and even conversations with strangers on airplanes spent learning and talking about the science he loves. “When you're doing what you're passionate about, no one can outwork you,” he tells Christian. That obsession has translated into decades of product development, including work on new approaches to energy, metabolism, muscle performance, recovery, and ingredient delivery.
Now AI is changing the speed at which Shawn can explore what comes next. He describes using molecular chemistry and a database ranking ingredients across 20 categories to help anticipate how potential compounds may interact in the body. Projects that have traditionally taken years to develop can now be explored much more efficiently, giving Shawn a powerful new tool for the work he has been pursuing since those early days reading bodybuilding magazines and supplement encyclopedias. For someone whose career began with a fascination for what might be possible, it’s an exciting glimpse at how much faster the next discovery could arrive.
