Biotech startup SynFlora introduced an attractive pitch for a brand new kind of pores and skin therapy know-how to 4YFN on the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to enhance understanding of the pores and skin’s microbiome and engineer pores and skin microbes with the objective of enabling extra focused and novel therapeutics.
The essential thought is to ship therapies in a deeper manner than topically utilized lotions, resembling is the case with current-gen “lively” skincare merchandise — but additionally to design and engineer a wider vary of therapies by utilizing biotech strategies to harness micro organism to ship focused therapeutics.
“We’re making a base of a brand new pores and skin product which isn’t anymore simply molecules, which may’t enter the pores and skin as a result of they’re topically utilized — it’s actually like a molecular machine,” says co-founder and CEO Nastassia Knödlseder. “A micro organism which may transfer contained in the hair follicle, like deep contained in the pores and skin, and produce new [effects].”
The group’s early analysis “proof of idea” work is targeted on pimples — and it’s lately printed a paper on its experimental therapy supply method within the journal Nature Biotechnology (on a check of a “sebum modulator” in an engineered pores and skin microbe in mice) — however they envisage the method being utilized to deal with a a lot wider vary of points, together with issues that vary properly past what we would take into account skincare.
Potential use circumstances they point out might embody mosquito repellant or fats loss (a cream for making cellulite disappear anybody?), per Knödlseder, and even vaccines and anti inflammatory therapies.
“Now we have the potential triggering the immune system or creating vaccines in opposition to melanoma, for instance,” she suggests. “Now we have the potential for the manufacturing of anti-inflammatory molecules.”
“We see this actually like as a platform,” she provides, confirming the group has patents for various indications of the know-how and for the platform itself. “We actually don’t wish to restrict to at least one use case.”
SynFlora continues to be at an early stage — they’re within the means of elevating a seed spherical, per Knödlseder — and can clearly must fulfill regulators of the protection and efficacy of their novel bioengineered mechanism for delivering therapeutics deeper into the dermis earlier than the tech will be capable of attain shoppers.
However the co-founders counsel they may very well be between one to 3 years away from their novel system powering a brand new technology of skin-delivered therapeutics.
