Breakthroughs In Growth Factor Delivery and Oleosomes With Core Biogenesis

0:00Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is a very special episode because we're going to be talking about more behind the scenes stuff today. We're interviewing a brand that is really involved more on the ingredient side and the technology side of things when we're talking about new and emerging things in skincare. I know a lot of you love to learn more about what goes behind some of the very powerful brands, the cutting edge brands. And a lot of that has to do with the technologies that come out from wonderful biotechnology companies. So without further ado, I would love to introduce you guys to the Chief Commercial Officer at Core Biogenesis, Tony Abode.

0:39Welcome, Tony. I'm so excited to host you. Thank you so much, and thanks for having me, Dr. Ecta. Pleasure to be here. No, it's exciting to have you on the show because of all the things we're going to talk about, I think it's very rare for consumers to get this look behind the scenes, right? Instead of just looking at a full-formed brand to understand what goes into the technology behind truly efficacious products. And I think what you guys are doing at Core Biogenesis is so innovative. You know, it's so amazing to see and for our listeners to be able to understand. So with that said, Tony, I'd love for you to talk about your background because you come from a deep biotech background.

1:12So can you walk us down memory lane a little bit and tell us how did you get involved with innovation and skincare from the biotech perspective and all that good stuff? Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you so much. And pleasure to be here with your listeners. So as Dr. Ehta mentioned, I've always been very passionate about the technologies behind the brands, the intel inside or the Splenda inside the Diet Coke. Like what is that ingredient that sort of powers the innovation and that delivers the claims? So my journey started in the early 2000s. I knew I loved the sciences. I was deep into research, clinical research.

1:45And I walked through a biotech company in Canada and just kind of fell in love with it. I couldn't believe that I could sort of leverage this wonderful scientific principles into the business world and making a difference to human lives. So I got really passionate about the industry called biotechnology in the early 2000s, graduated with a degree called a master's in biomedical technology at the University of Calgary and just sort of dove into biotech. And I actually sort of fell into the skincare and personal care world a little bit early in my career when the biotech company I was working for decided to form a subsidiary in skincare.

2:22So they were already in drug development and pharmaceuticals, and they sort of wanted to explore this other industry. And I guess I happened to be the guy who was maybe the most sales oriented in the bunch. And it's like, Tony, you want to go try to work this subsidiary? And I had no idea what I was doing at the time. But what I loved when I started to get into it, Dr. Ecto, was the ability to translate scientific principles and findings into consumer products in a very quick timeframe. So we're not talking about seven to 10 years and billions of dollars of investment for drug development. We're talking about six to 18 months and some formative in vitro and in vivo studies.

2:58And you can be in front of the L 'Oreal's and Estee Lauder's of the world with a new ingredient innovation. So I think I was just floored by that. And then, you know, in another six to 18 months, you could have a product on the shelf at Sephora or Ulta that includes your active ingredient. So I love the speed of market adoption, but also the science behind the personal care industry. Yeah, that's really, really cool that you mentioned that, because I think that's where the missing link is oftentimes is understanding, you know, people say I've spent four years creating a product, right? They'll say that if we're talking to a brand and then you always wonder, it's like, well, where, what was that four years?

3:36you know what I mean like what went behind that four years and so when you talk about the technologies and then really understanding what makes a product efficacious I mean that stuff is really for me as well as even as a consumer I've always been intrigued by that you know it's like how long does it take because as you articulated very well was this idea that you know things can take a long time but to be able to do it quickly with studies and and really prove that this works and then bring it I mean that's huge and I think that that's something that oftentimes it never gets talked about you know that's why i think there's so much interest from consumers in this realm of like innovation and technology so that's very cool so core biogenesis focuses on making like high purity proteins from plants right so why was this such a crucial shift compared to like traditional ingredient manufacturing yeah yeah great question so we actually focus on on proteins and peptides as a class of active ingredients that really we felt needed dramatic improvement in the way that they were manufactured.

4:38I'm sure your listeners are quite familiar with peptides. I mean, peptides are sort of a booming class of active ingredients. These are typically short chains, you know, two, three, four amino acid. They lack three-dimensional structure and they sort of penetrate through the skin and have a desired effect, but they're largely foreign to the body. These are not materials that the body naturally produces. Whereas proteins are the building blocks of the body. Those are the master builders that are responsible for all of our mechanisms and literally build our bodies from scratch. So we always felt that proteins and peptides needed new ways to be manufactured.

5:16The classic ways of getting recombinant proteins or longer chain peptides are there's really only two ways. You can isolate them from human stem cells, or you can use precision fermentation like bacteria or yeast in bioreactors. And we felt both those ways had flaws. I mean, isolating proteins from human cells is it can be risky. It can be it's slightly controversial. And there are safety implications of taking proteins from human cells and then, you know, putting them in formulations for other people to use. And there's certain countries that prohibit the use of human derived proteins. So the industry in general doesn't love that approach to getting protein.

5:53So they've relied on fermentation. And fermentation involves these large capital extensive facility builds. It involves large bioreactors and a lot of carbon output. And there's also extensive purification required to purify their protein away from the cells and removing endotoxins, removing all these other components of the cells. So we kind of felt like, listen, there's got to be other ways to make proteins. There's got to be other ways to make biomimetic proteins or proteins that are human identical. So Core Biogenesis was formed on the basis of using plants as the organism of choice instead of yeast or bacteria.

6:35And using plants, really, we get all these wonderful advantages, which I'll touch on in a few minutes. But that's why the company was formed. And really, Alex, Alexandre Rieber, the CEO of CORE, had been going for a couple of years in the pharma industry, actually making proteins for the pharmaceutical industry and stem cell research. And I came across the company and I was just like, wow, these guys have got to get into skincare. I said, there's such a need for high quality biomimetic proteins. And knowing some of the challenges, I approached Alex and it was like the meeting of the minds. I understood the cosmetic skincare industry.

7:10He understood his wonderful plant platform, and we just sort of hit it off and kind of started this journey. So that's sort of where it all started, was really making sort of these actives more sustainable, more scalable, and really just more effective, as I'll talk about in a few minutes, how we do that. That's really cool. No, I like that, actually, because I think that plant-derived is often misunderstood. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at any medical advancements before modern allopathic medicine took over and big pharma came into play, we were getting everything from botanicals.

7:44It's been a long tradition in human history to tap into the power of plant-based medicine, you know, in some way or other. So for me, when I look at it as scientists, it makes complete sense, right? Because sometimes people really do assume that if you don't have something coming directly from human-based models, right, it's not going to be biocompatible with us. It's not the case. For everyone listening, I mean, when things react and they work, it's really just kind of like a lock and key mechanism, and that can be engineered or it can be extracted from other sources like plants. It doesn't have to come from humans.

8:18So it's very interesting, actually, that you brought that concept up. And I think for listeners, it's important to understand that there is true viability behind these options. It's not going to be less efficacious than something coming from a stem cell, you know, so that's really important. Yeah. Yeah, and I think using biotechnology, we can actually transform the plant to make the biomimetic protein. So it makes the protein that is 100 % equivalent to the protein that your body makes, right down to the amino acid. So that's why we're so excited about using plants as our vehicle to produce these proteins, instead of like, to your point, extracting it from human cells, which could cause a lot of downstream irritation or issues with the host.

9:01But I think it's very elegant how our CEO has created some little short videos, which hopefully we can share with some of your listeners. But I just love some of the words he's saying, like, forget machine bioreactors and chemical synthesis. Our factory is alive and vibrant. Instead of extracting resources, we cultivate them. And the future isn't made in a factory. It's grown with nature. So it's using mother nature to really look at what's next. So we're excited about the company and the potential and see it as a platform for 100 years of proteins and peptides and skincare and beyond. I love that.

9:34It's beautiful what he said, actually. That's really, I think, at the heart of true innovation is understanding the role that nature actually plays and understanding the intricacies of processes that occur in nature. When people talk about plant-derived anything, I'm just always like, yeah, because you know what? Do you know how many centuries it took for that plant to get to where it is to be able to do this process and to create this? I mean, it's a very intricate set of mechanisms that have been at play here. So I think that it actually makes a lot of sense. And it's really great for the sustainability side of things, I think, because nobody really talks about sustainability in the sense of getting down to the root cause of what is sustainable versus non, right?

10:16And that's a whole different topic, but I think that's very relevant here, especially because we're talking about biotech. And so people always say there's got to be some sort of downfall to biotechnology because it's become a buzzword now in the skincare industry, right? And speaking of buzzwords, I think things like, you know, you were talking about peptides versus proteins, and everybody has heard of them at this point. I think everyone owns a serum or a cream or something that has peptides written on it, right? But they're not buzzwords, they're real things. And also with proteins like epidermal growth factor or fibroblast growth factor, they're not trends.

10:49They're actual biological molecules that aid your cells in doing what they need to do, differentiating them, helping them do the normal mechanisms that are involved in the vitality of the skin, right? So this is very, very important stuff. So I want to ask you, why do you think bioidentical proteins are such a natural match for skin compared to the synthetic actives that we also hear about? Yeah, yeah, great question. So I think our industry has relied on synthetic small molecule type active ingredients for a long, long time. I mean, if you think of the niacinamides, the retinols, the vitamins, those are all small molecule, synthesized, they're very small, they penetrate through the body, and they're foreign to the body, they don't exist naturally within our body.

11:33Peptides are an evolution. You know, they're getting closer to things that our body naturally makes, but still, again, not generally made by the human body. What does the body naturally make? It's proteins. And we're talking about these wonderful three-dimensional structures, multi-amino acids, large molecules, large biomolecules. But there's so many good examples of proteins that literally run our body. I mean, you have things like lactoferrin, which is a wonderful antimicrobial protein in milk. You have heat shock proteins that really protect the body against inflammation and attack. You have collagen and elastin, like the building blocks of the skin.

12:14You have superoxide dismutase, which helps with reactive oxygen species. These are all proteins that are just critical to the function of the body. And some of these proteins, as we get older, as we age, they start to diminish in our body. So the proteins that we are really interested in exploring are this class of protein called growth factors, which you alluded to already. This is epidermal growth factor, EGF, or fibroblast growth factor 2, and there's many, many others. And those are proteins that are literally critical for repair, regeneration, wound healing. They stimulate collagen elastin production inside the body.

12:52As we get old, we just stop making them. And when we stop making them, this is why we age. This is a root cause of aging. So we were always fascinated by like, okay, in the industry, we're always putting these foreign molecules that may or may not stimulate different cascading mechanisms, but also can have irritation consequences because the body's just never seen these things before. Why don't we replenish the proteins that the body naturally made and start to diminish? Let's put it back topically on the skin in a really stable way. And then you can do some fundamental, wonderful things to the body.

13:26So we believe that the bioidentical protein revolution is coming. It's not here yet. It's actually very rare to see a lot of proteins being used in skincare just because it's hard to manufacture them. You know, it's again, like I alluded to before, it's like human cells or precision fermentation with bacteria, which is cost constraint and capacity constraint. So now that we have this plant system where we just literally plant our camelina sativa plants in greenhouses with some water and some earth and some sunlight, we can make any biomimetic protein. And so I think we're hopefully a catalyst to this whole movement of replenishing the proteins that the body naturally made, but is stopping to make.

14:08So that's why we're so passionate about this area and growth factors specifically. I love that. And I think that that's such a critical point that you've brought up is this decline with age. I think this is something that we've only seen discussed in relevance to collagen, right, or elastin or something like that. We've never talked about growth factors in that way, where we're trying to explain, I mean, people need to understand that your body with age, it goes into this catabolic state, you're starting to destroy more than you're building, you know, so there's like catabolism, there's anabolic and catabolic, and the anabolic processes kind of decline with age overall.

14:44So you're absolutely right in what you said. And I think for our listeners, it's really important to understand that there's a lot of stuff out here that is claiming that, okay, this is what you need, but you have to really get down to the root cause of why your body is showing signs of aging. And it really does come down to what Tony was saying, where when you don't have essential signaling molecules or growth factors or stuff, that is a direct link between how your cells are responding to the environmental stressors that you're experiencing and what they're doing to combat that, you know, and that goes deep, that goes way beyond even just the topical appearance of how your skin looks.

15:20It goes into things like inflammation and how your body handles it and what your cells can do to combat that, right? It's like the defense response that they have towards it. So these are all very, very complex, I think, mechanisms tied in, but they are all a part of aging. So when people say anti-aging i'm always kind of irked by that because it's like there's so much more to unpack here you know it's like it's really about the biochemistry of the body at this point you know when you're experiencing the aging side effects that people notice right in the mirror on the skin it's it's a very complex thing going on so i love that and i think bioidentical proteins are definitely the future i just want to say because when i think yeah well you know when you think about even tony like think about precision medicine right it's on the rise right now Everyone's talking about precision, translational medicine.

16:07And what is that? That's exactly this. You have to find bioidentical options that can then be used to supplement where we're lacking. And so I think you guys are really on the cutting edge with what you're doing. It's so fascinating. Very cool. Thank you so much. Yeah. And I think growth factors in general, when we became really into this whole field, because we had this wonderful platform with plants producing proteins. And we thought, okay, so what are the first proteins we really want to dramatically improve in the industry? Yeah. And we came around, I mean, growth factors are not new. They've been used since the 1990s by Dr.

16:41Brown, who I had the pleasure of meeting, who founded Raviv in New York. He was putting, yeah, wonderful man. And he was telling me he put EGF on wounds to try to heal wounds in the 90s. So, but what I was so intrigued by was, okay, they've been around since the 90s. They're like the holy grail of aging and our body naturally depletes them. So reintroducing them should have wonderful effects. However, when you look at the research from the 90s to today, the data is mixed. And I think the reason that the data is mixed is because these proteins are quite unstable. And sometimes you get the formulation right and you're stabilizing them and you get good results.

17:21Sometimes you get the formulation wrong, the protein denatures and you don't have any efficacy. So we identified this wonderful sort of legacy class of molecules that had a lot of potential. But really, when you think of it, there's less than 100 brands in the world that use growth factors in skincare. That's not a lot for something being around for 30 years. So we're like, oh, there's got to be some reasons why. So we identified two major issues with growth factors. One, they're unstable. So again, in our industry and skincare, formulations have to go through a very rigorous stability process.

17:54They got to go through oven stability, freeze-thaw testing. We're talking about months and months of testing. So if the protein falls apart in the first month and then hits the shelf at Sephora or Ulta, and then that person doesn't even get the benefit of the growth factor, but they have no real idea, I guess. That's a flawed active, right? It's just not stable. And then second of all, they're large proteins. They're 20, 30 kilodalton proteins that will not penetrate very well through the stratum corneum. So they're not going to have a wonderful sort of downstream effect and act in the epidermis and dermis where they need to be to stimulate collagen elastin.

18:30So we felt, OK, look, cool class, lots of potential, big problems right now. So that's where we kind of got excited about this. Like, listen, we're going to use our plant biofactory process to just dramatically improve this. This is really the heart of our technology is actually having the plant produce growth factors on the surface of a natural delivery system in plants called oleosomes. And this is what sets us apart, I think, from any other production system is we can use Mother Nature's machinery to our advantage. These oleosomes are found in every oil seed. So whether it be sunflower, safflower, camelina, anything that has oil, plants and Mother Nature has derived these structures to protect the oil in these phospholipid spheres.

19:20And these phospholipid spheres actually include natural vitamin E from the plant. And this prevents the oil from getting rancid, from oxidizing, because Mother Nature needs her oil to sort of fuel the germination process. So these oleosomes are these beautiful little micron-sized droplets of oil with lipids. And we found in our studies that when we fused proteins like growth factors to the surface of oleosomes, we have dramatically better stability. We can improve stability of growth factors by 10x. Wow. So suddenly we have a protein that's, again, a miracle sort of anti-aging hero that now is finally stabilized.

19:59We're not having to worry about them falling apart in the serum or cream on the way to the store. So this was what really got us excited about sort of fixing some of the problems of growth factors in the industry. So I want you to explain that for our listeners in terms of what that means practically for their formulations and the products they buy. This is huge. I mean, I'm floored by that. That's very interesting because stability is the big, big question mark a lot of times. with when I'm buying products. I'm like, hmm, I know this contains this, but have you done the stability? Is it gonna last?

20:33Is it really something my skin is gonna utilize, right? So I would love for you to break it down for our listeners so they can understand why this matters so much when it comes to formulation. Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of actives in skincare and personal care that are prone to stability challenges. I mean, probably the one that most people are aware of is retinol. I mean, retinol is highly unstable and it does require a lot of delivery systems and different modifications to make it more stable. Growth factor proteins are just, you have to keep them in their biomimetic state, meaning you have to keep the human identical sequence.

21:06Because the second you start to modify amino acids, you no longer have the biomimetic protein. So you're kind of stuck with the protein as is, but if you have ways to deliver it or to stabilize it with delivery systems, then that's really important. Like you said before, we're like the technology inside the brand. And so our customers are not the consumer. Our customers are the formulation scientists and the product developers around the world. And we're really quite proud of a head-to-head study we've conducted on oleosome EGF versus we call it naked EGF, which is the EGF that everybody else sort of offers from bacteria or yeast cells or human cells.

21:45And we did a 12-week oven stability. And every week we took a sample and looked at the relative protein concentration remaining. And we found that after 12 weeks in the oven, the oleosome EGF, we retained 93 % of the protein, whereas the naked EGF, we were only able to recover 8%. So that's sort of why I think growth factors have been stalled is because the biggest companies in the world are excited. They put it through their stability and then they notice that the naked EGFs just fall apart. So they just don't move forward. I think finally, we're able to sort of withstand the rigors of the stability process.

22:18And most importantly, get the product in the final serum to the customer. Because Dr. Ekta, I read an interesting stat the other day. And that is that 90 % of female consumers are frustrated with the performance of their skincare products. 90 %! Yeah, that's insane. That's crazy. That's a bad... That means our industry is not doing a good job right now. If 90 % of our consumers are unhappy. because the reality is a lot of the legacy actives take 30 to 60 days to work and why can't we make actives that work in 14 or 30 days exactly thank you yeah that's give give the consumer hope give the consumer hope that when she or he is looking in the mirror they start to see that dark spot fading or they start to see that that crow's feet starting to retreat a little bit i mean that's the hope that they need right exactly and that's why people spend thousands of dollars like it's not a you know and that's what really gets me is brands will say this right and they'll they'll disclose it they're like oh well you have to give it 90 days for it to work i'm like who the hell has 90 days like yeah no way no way i'm gonna give you two weeks like i had a brief stint on the b2c side i worked with a direct-to-consumer skincare brand i quickly found dr echo that that was not my home i'm not a b2c guy and i gotta get back in the technology but the one thing i was at these beauty conferences with the retailers and things.

23:43And they were talking about what's the repurchase rate for consumers. And he said, oh, best in class is like 30%. If you can get your consumer to come back 30 % of the time to buy a second time, you're winning. And I'm like, what? I worked so hard to get that customer to buy that one time. They try my product, nothing's working for them. And they're promiscuous. They're going and finding another skincare brand that's going to give them a big promise. They open up their TikTok and they see another ad with an influencer and they migrate. It's because the product doesn't work quick enough. That's really why it's a 30 % rebuy rate is the industry standard.

24:21If you've got something that works in seven or 14 days, trust me, that consumer is buying for life. They're not migrating to the next shiny object that they see. So that's really the truth though. I mean, I can tell you, you know, even from my own experience the things I have in my arsenal right it's like my true skincare arsenal these are products I will buy for the rest of my life you know what I mean they're not it's not a 30 % repurchase thing it's a lifetime repurchase thing for me you know and I think a lot of especially women are like that because it's so hard when you finally find something and so when you find it you're like I will never let this go that's like a real thing that happens so I I just don't believe that.

25:02I don't believe that we should even be, there should be no happiness when you read that there's only a 30 % repurchase rate. That's bad. You know, that is bad. That is bad. Yeah. So it all comes to us. It all comes down to the active ingredients. It all comes down to the next generation of bioidentical proteins and growth factors that are stable. And I didn't mention this either, but one other thing we noticed with the oleosome growth factor fusion is that they penetrate through the stratum corneum. So not only do you have a stable protein, you have a protein that it can actually reach the epidermis and dermis, which is where you want it to go, which that's where the growth factor stimulates collagen and elastin production.

25:42It builds up the extracellular matrix. It does all the wonderful things that you want it to do, because if it sits on the surface, it's not doing what it needs to do. That's not where the receptors are. So we were floored when we found that this oleosome, which is micron in size. it basically sort of collapses on the top layers of the skin by the phospholipids and the oleosomes interact with the lipids on your skin and sort of shuttle the protein through. So it's very cool. We've done a lot of studies with epiderm FT and sort of skin explant models to sort of visualize this penetration. It is important to note though, that the protein stops in the dermis.