Biotech startup SynFlora brought a tantalizing pitch for a new type of skin care technology to 4YFN at the MWC trade show in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to improve the understanding of the skin microbiome and to engineer skin microbes with the aim of enabling more targeted and novel treatments.
The basic idea is to deliver treatments in a deeper way than topically applied creams, as is the case with the current generation of “active” skin care products — but also to design and engineer a wider range of treatments using biotechnological methods to harness bacteria to provide targeted treatments.
“We’re creating a foundation of a new skin product that’s no longer just molecules, which can’t get into the skin because they’re applied topically — it’s really like a molecular machine,” says co-founder and CEO Nastassia Knödlseder. “A bacterium that can move into the hair follicle, like deep into the skin, and produce new [effects].”
The group’s early proof-of-concept research work focuses on acne — and recently published a paper about its experimental treatment-delivery approach in the journal Nature Biotechnology (in a test of a ‘sebum modulator’ on an engineered skin microbe in mice) — but predict the approach will be applied to address a much wider range of issues, including issues that vary far beyond what we might consider skin care.
Possible uses they cite could include mosquito repellent or fat loss (cellulite vanishing cream?), according to Knödlseder, or even vaccines and anti-inflammatory treatments.
“We have the potential to activate the immune system or create melanoma vaccines, for example,” he suggests. “We have the ability to produce anti-inflammatory molecules.”
“We really see it as a platform,” he adds, confirming that the team has patents for different indications of the technology and for the platform itself. “We don’t really want to limit ourselves to one use case.”
SynFlora is still early stage—it’s in the process of developing a seed, per Knödlseder—and will obviously have to satisfy regulators about the safety and efficacy of their new industrialization of delivering therapeutics deeper into the dermis before the technology will be in position to reach consumers.
But the co-founders suggest they could be between one and three years away from their new system powering a new generation of skin-delivered therapeutics.
