Latest / The Science of Skin / Dr. Thomas Hitchcock shares his groundbreaking research on the skin microbiome and how he engineered microbes that could effectively rejuvenate aging skin.

Transcript

Dr. Thomas Hitchcock shares his groundbreaking research on the skin microbiome and how he engineered microbes that could effectively rejuvenate aging skin. · The Science of Skin

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Dr.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Patty Ferris.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a board certified dermatologist, and I'm your host for this episode of Skincare Confidential.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm really excited to speak with our guest, Dr.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Hitchcock.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: He is a self-proclaimed holobiontologist, so we're going to have to talk about that word, specializing in the skin biome.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: He earned his PhD in genetics from Clemson University and went on to complete a postdoc at Duke University and Yale in biomedical engineering, vascular biology, and therapeutics, and at Will Cornell Medical College, studying multiple myeloma genetics.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's an interesting background I want to talk about.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: As an inventor, Dr.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hitchcock's also been issued patents on his inventions in aesthetic medicine, dermatology, and microbiology.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And most recently, he co-authored the book, Rebooting the Microbiome, or actually Rebooting the Biome, I apologize, along with my good friend and dermatologist, Dr.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Doris Day.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So welcome to Skincare Confidential, Thomas.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing I want to dive right into is your journey because you and I had a coffee one morning, and I was very intrigued by how you ended up in the skincare business coming out of biomedical engineering.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: You've done a lot of interesting things.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So please enlighten the audience about that.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so starting with the word holobiontologist, you know, I'm not sure if that's something that I coined or not, but the word holobiont is basically the concept that a complex organism like a human is not alone.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, we don't function in isolation.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: We function with a whole ecosystem of organisms on us.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: We function within the environment that everything is symbiotic in nature.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so years ago, when I started studying skin, I quickly pivoted to the fact that we cannot just consider skin as an as a sterile thing.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not sterile in the sense that it's just human biology.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually a conglomerate of all sorts of organisms that work together and to make this what we call the holobiont.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I used to call myself a skin scientist, but now I call myself a holobiontologist because I want to make it clear that I don't just study the human components, I study everything, including the microbiome, the environment, everything, and even the gut and how what we eat, the stress, how we sleep, all that feeds into even the skin is fed by all those things.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so I studied genetics.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm formerly trained as a geneticist, a human molecular geneticist.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I went on to do my postdoctorate work after my I got my doctorate at Duke and Yale in tissue engineering, actually.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was in vascular and pulmonary tissues under the uh the lab, under the tutelage, I guess you'd say, of Dr.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Laura Nicholson, who's one of the leaders in that field.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I thought it was fascinating.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: That was back, I don't know if you remember back when they had the ear that they grow in the back of the mouse, and everybody was all like amazed about.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was back in those days where you know tissue engineering was still kind of like exciting and new, but not a lot of applications per se in the real world.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what we were trying to do was grow artificial blood vessels, not artificial, but tissue engineered blood vessels from human cells.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was doing genetically, I was genetically manipulating viruses to basically make cells that were senescent from like 80-year-old patients getting cabbage surgeries so that I could grow a vessel, small diameter vessel, so they could use them for transplantation for bypasses.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we were successful, we were able to do it, uh, but the issue was that I kind of got a little disillusioned with the whole process because you're basically growing a perfect tissue, and then you're putting it back into a diseased state or diseased system.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's more like a fancy band-aid than anything else.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I then I started to be fascinated more with, and that was around the time that MD Anderson was doing that research on um um like CART T cells and stuff for cancer and using genetic therapies in order to change systemically.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh gene therapy had lost, had become out of vogue for a while because it caused the leukemia in the young patients that they had tried at that at that time.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: But now it's way, it's back, it's back, and as we all know, there's a lot of things that you can do as far as mRNA, epigenetics, all that stuff, and manipulating that.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I got interested in that, and that's what I was doing, some of that work at while Cornell and Multiple Myeloma.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: But then, you know, as a poor scientist living in New York City at the time, right out of you know, uh my postdocates making very little money and trying to pay rent for a studio, I left academics and went into the industry, and I just happened to land in a company that was looking for a scientist with some tissue engineering experience.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it then it was in aesthetics uh and dermatology, and it was there that I started to explore aesthetics by going to conferences and stuff, and I started to notice that there was a trend that was a little alarming for me coming from like really high-level science institutions, and I was seeing some stuff that was a little bit um, I guess, reductive, if that's the right word, when it came to uh companies that were selling things that they couldn't explain how they worked.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I was a little bit um, I saw a huge opportunity for us to take the field of aesthetics and dermatology to a place where we could substantiate more of the data and and and substantiate more of the science.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I was working with smaller companies, startup companies that, and I was lower level at that point because I was pretty entry-level into the workforce after my postdocs.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't get a lot of say uh in the directions of companies, but there were certain companies that I would basically say, guys, the reason why you're not getting great results is this and this, and they didn't really want to listen because it takes an investment to actually validate and to develop things the right way.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of them just want to, you know, get them on the market and get them.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Get them in the market and start selling them.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so um I decided, okay, well, then I'll start my own company.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And um I actually had started a gentleman named Joe Proctor.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we we started a company called Bellis Medical together that uh does microneedling devices.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was uh great to get my feet wet as an entrepreneur and um executive, but really it was when I started Zygrobe therapeutics by myself uh in San Diego that really I kind of cut my teeth into the world of you know, basically taking the idea of something from a thought in my head and producing it to a product that actually can, I believe, change change a lot of things in the way that we care for the skin.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna let's talk about the zyprobe technology and what that is.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um for those listening, that we're gonna enter into the area of topical probiotics, which is quite popular, and there are lots of products in the marketplace touting different probiotics and prebiotics and postbiotics.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe give us a little bit of information, sort of general, about that category of skincare products, and then most specifically what you did, which is very innovative in that space.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and just so everybody knows there's not a ghost.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my dog, I'm at my house, my dog's going in and out of that door, and uh in my I'm in my puzzle room, and so that's where all my puzzles are and stuff.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, but um so yeah, so really the field of topical probiotics is one that is rife with a with a bit of um misconceptions, uh, misuse of definitions.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's where, you know, uh unfortunately the science cut up after the industry had already kind of tried to take a foothold.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so the industry, uh, you know, we look, we're not bagging on marketing and sales.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's how things get made and developed.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: If we didn't make money off things, probably no inventions would ever happen.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact is, um, sometimes the cart comes before the horse, if you will.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what happened in in this particular um type of technology where we knew a lot about the gut and the gut probiotics and what was really kind of moving the needle when it comes to the gut.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: But even in the gut, there's a lot of discrepancy behind what is truly scientific, like specific strains that really improve things like cholesterol, even and and uh IBS and stuff like that.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's companies that will go out and like try to jump on the bandwagon and they'll say, well, if they got 10 strains, we got 50 strains.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if they got 10 billion CFU, we got 100 million, 100 billion CFU.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: The fact is, if you go to any grocery store aisle and you buy some probiotics, a lot of them will just not even be probiotics.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're just dead because those companies don't go, they're not regulated the same way drugs are.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so there are some great companies out there that make gut probiotics that are uh fully functional.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're typically a little more expensive because they go through the cold chain process and all that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason why I mentioned that is because that industry is what fueled the probiotic topical industry.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because people were like, well, if the gut can be helped by these, then we can smear smear them on the skin and they should also be beneficial.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that around the time that this started to be a thing was around the time that uh scientists got this new tool, uh, where in the past we had to just take a swab and culture it and wait to see what grew.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're able to basically take any given sample and do sequencing.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we can see not only the number of species, but even down to the strains of the different species, because somebody discovered that a specific sequence that is unique to bacteria actually has uh unique mutations that can be even strain-specific.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so once we found that out, we started to realize that it's a more complicated story than we thought.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just about putting bacteria here and there, it's about really this complex um uh kind of mishmash of different types of microbes and different strains of microbes, and it's not just, and a lot of people don't realize that our skin is not this smooth saran wrap over our bodies.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's and there's there's millions and millions of invaginations and holes and crevices for things to get in and live on, and each of those have unique niche.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there's different pHs, there's different amount of oxygen, there's different amount of food sources like sebum and sweat and salts, and all that affects what grows there.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then what I like to tell people is that um, if you think that any ingredient that's in your skincare is important, think about the fact that you have billions of microbes on your skin all the time, no matter how much you scrub, no matter how much you try to get them off, they're there and they're secreting things all the time.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what they secrete is contingent on how you treat them.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So if you treat it, they're just like we are just like a cornered animal.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you put them in the wrong environment, they're gonna secrete things like coagulases and stuff that can cause them to be more pathogenic.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you take care of them, a lot of times they will secrete things that are going to be beneficial for your health.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's really um the the journey that scientists have been on is this this kind of we're at this really interesting junction that happens a lot in history of medicine, where we've done something for so long that we're used to it and now it's starting to change.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: And people are starting to say, oh, oh no.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, did what I used to do actually harm people?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, was it the wrong thing?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, was it the wrong thing?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the wrong way to look at it.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, Doris actually, our our our uh friend Doris Day, you know, I've talked with her about this many, many times, and she was the one that originally, because I was a little harsh the way that I would put that before.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, Thomas, you can't go around, you know, telling people that they did it wrong.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to tell them that, you know, science and medicine progresses, and we do the best with what we have.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: But when we yeah, but when we know better, then we can do that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have to change, yeah.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I always say you do it state of the art at the time, based on what you know, and then you have to move on.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Talk a little bit about your using cutie bacterium, the specific subspecies, and how you manipulated that with your cycrobe technology.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's that's to me kind of the most interesting part of the whole story, is that, you know, when you look at the history of the skin microbiome and what scientists even now are still kind of wrestling with, and mostly consumers and even physicians at this point, is that we've been taught for the last 50, 60 years that C.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: acne, which used to be called P acnes, and even before that was C acne, because it was corneobacterium acnes originally.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they they've it's been villainized to the sense that people call it a pathogen.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: They say that you want to get rid of it.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so when I started Zycro back in 2013, it was right after we started getting all this new information and techniques that we could explore the microbiomes.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I was actually, my my thought was because when I started Zycro, my goal was that, you know, in the skin uh topical industry, everybody's trying to get more things that can get past the stratum, cornea, more absorption, all this stuff.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw a lot of things out there that I thought was hocus pocus and it wasn't real.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, well, what would I do for like psoriasis or acne if I wanted to get the therapeutic molecules into the body?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, well, it's bacteria because it lives in every nook and cranny.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So then it went even further to basically I what I said was, okay, for something like psoriasis and eczema and things that affect systemically the skin, um, we need to not just treat the surface because the disease is not just on the surface, there's a disease is throughout the whole follicular structure many times, or throughout the whole depth of the skin.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so I said, I want to find a bacteria that actually is able to go on the surface, but also engraft into the deepest parts of the skin.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I start to explore what that was, and I came to uh an article by Dr.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Huang Li at UCLA, and I always butcher her name, so forgive me, Dr.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Li, but um, she actually put out a wonderful publication out of her lab and a lot of her colleagues and postdocs there, where they sampled hundreds of people that had acne or didn't have acne, and they found that every single person has the majority of their follicular microbiome as C acne.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: It just comes down to there's a lot of different ribotypes.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's hundreds, if not thousands, of different ribotypes or subspecies or strains, if you will.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so I said that's what we need to do.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: We need to find the most health-associated strain of C acnes and use that because that lives mostly in the follicle, but it also lives a little bit on the surface.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're basically the only way to treat the whole skin is to use the C acnes.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so what we were doing is we were taking human genes for interleukin or something like that, interleukin 10, and putting it into the chromosome of the of the bacteria and then putting a genetic switch to turn off uh that ability to so it was a safety mechanism.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um a few years later, uh some scientists basically uh published that there's such a discrepancy between the subspecies and strains within C acne, so gent such genetic diversity that they said we need to break them up into subspecies.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that I um tend to talk to people about this is it's just like you would look at a house dog like a beagle, which is my my dog, and you would look at a gray wolf.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a gray wolf would probably eat you and your beagle, and a beagle is gonna lick you and cuddle with you and be your friend.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're the same species.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're just genetically so diverse that they've taken different places and they're actually different subspecies within this Canus lupus family.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: One's Canus lupus familiaris, one's Canus lupus lupus.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And just like that, they found that there's C.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: acnes acne, which is associated with acne, there's C acnes defendins, which is associated with health, and there's C.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: acnes elongatum, which is kind of, you know, they're they're still figuring out what that even falls into.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so we uh isolated a strain of C.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: acne defendins, and we we looked for all these different genetic markers and such that were associated with skin health.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we we were using, again, we had the IL-10s and all that stuff in there to we were looking at a psoriasis model.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we were finding that while the psoriasis strains that we developed were really kicking psoriasis butt, meaning it was like mitigating in the mouse models psoriasis completely.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we also found that when we used the wild type with the genetic switch we put in there that for growth arrest so that it just didn't overpropagate, that it also was showing seriously high levels of antioxidants.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it was actually lowering inflammation in the disease states and such.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we decided that if everybody on the face of the earth has the majority of their microbes as C acnes, we should probably curate those.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so we saw this as an opportunity.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we started to study these specific strain, which we designated as XYCM42.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the more that we studied them, the more we saw that they were spitting out stuff that is better than any skincare ingredient.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the part that was the most amazing is that they're doing it all the time.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: So rather than one of the great things about what we've learned in dermatology over the last 50 years is that there are wonderful molecules out there.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like vitamin C's are wonderful molecules.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh retinoic acid has been a life changer for a lot of people.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I like to say to people a lot of times in medicine, we take two steps forward and then one step back because we start, we find a great substance or technique and then we overuse it or abuse it or something, and then we have to learn to mitigate that by doing something else.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel we're kind of at that place where we um are overusing retinoids and such.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found with the zycrobes, which that's what we call them, but it's the the strain with the genetic switch, um, is that they produce uh a lot of the same, or they upregulate or regulate a lot of the same genes that retinol do, um, including like IgF1, which makes the skin produce more barrier, basically, like phalagrins and ceramides and such.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it eats the oils of the skin, which produ and then metabolizes them into things like propionic acid, which you know we all know, things like sal acid and all these other things.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, propionic acid is uh of the family of short-chain fatty acids, similar to what like butyric acid and acetic acid, the things that our gut microbes produce to make us healthy in the gut.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, propionic acid is why they used to call it P.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: acnes or propionic bacterium acnes.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's actually a terosinase inhibitor, which is one of the reasons why vitamin C is popular.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um C.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: acnes uh as a species secretes huge amounts of antioxidants.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's because it's an anaerobic microbe, it doesn't like air.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: So when it goes on the surface, it says I don't like air, so it protects itself with a bunch of antioxidants, which serendipitously protects us.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: But we've been taught to wash them away.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh interestingly, also is that um, and we didn't, we're not the only ones that have seen this, but there's other been other authors and labs as well that saw that the right health-associated strain of C acnes actually is immunomodulary, where it actually can train the immune system to seek out the bad strains and clear the skin.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then kind of one other one that's really interesting is the porphyrin story.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because we, you know, we take the black light, the woods lamp, and you look at the skin, what glows there is the porphyrins that are by the C acnes.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: But we found out that the health-associated strains don't really.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the, for instance, the blue light that we've been using, it really is interesting that what happens is it actually causes the porphyrins to be free radicals and like benzoyl peroxide, then it kills the microbes.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And but the thing that we've been missing is that we can kill the microbes with great things like BPO and blue light, but we have to replace them with the right strains, otherwise, it's just going to repopulate.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we saw the aha moment, the opportunity that it's not just about annihilation, it's not just about good, bad microbes, it's about putting the right microbes in the right places with the right food source and giving them the right environment so that they could be um symbiotic.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and be beneficial, be secreting all those beneficial molecules.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's so fascinating.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Talk a little bit.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the skincare line is called Biojuve, just so everybody knows, and talk a little bit about the products because I know you have a little different technology in the morning product and the evening product and how those sort of go together.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um, you know, I I don't even like to call it skincare, and I know that's a little eye roll-y to some people, like you're splitting hairs, uh Thomas, but I I actually call it skin biome care.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why I distinguish that is that skin care is great, but you can't just care for the skin, you have to care for the microbiome and you have to care for the environment.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: For so it's just like you can't plant a banana tree in Antarctica and it thrive, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um nor do you want to because there's nothing, you know, there's no monkeys to feed in Antarctica.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to plant the right species in the right place for it to thrive because it has a right food source, it's the right environment, and plus it has the right things that it's trying to feed or or or or change or modify.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the line, it actually seeks to do those things.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the night product, which is a anhydrous gel that has encapsulated, uh it's a proprietary method where we've done at least 15 months worth of stability data and we'll keep on going until it craps out.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: But right now at 15 months, we see uh clinically significant live cells that can be in this anhydrous, because basically we freeze-dry them into a crystal state that when you add the activating mist, which is mostly water with some arabinose, you dissolve those crystals, it wakes them up out of dormancy, and then the arabinose is actually what turns on that genetic switch and it lets the microbes actually divide for a little bit, but we don't want them to divide too much because what microbes secrete when they divide is very different when they secrete when they're basically at a stationary kind of phase where they're just sustaining themselves.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: And additionally, we want them to spend more of their energy not on cell division, but on metabolism, which allows them to spit out all those healthy substances that we want.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so at night, you basically that's all you do is you'd wash the face with a gentle cleanser that actually conditions the face to receive the microbes.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: It basically like makes a nice little bed for them so that they're going to be happy when they wake up.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and also we feel strongly that you should get away from using uh a lot of detergents and surfactants and such.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm all about using as little surfactants as possible on the skin.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: So soaps that don't um lather, staying away from soaps at all, but uh cleansers that don't lather, uh, and and you don't need that stuff.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's all in there for really for marketing in a really cosmesis, people like cleansers.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh that's really all you do at night is you wash your face with the cleanser.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: You can I I say you take off the makeup with like a microfiber cloth, use a gentle cleanser, and then put on the live microbes and go to sleep.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh for eight hours you have them doing what I call microbioforming, which is like the terraforming of your face where they're eating the oils and producing all these great molecules and even engrafting.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I have I wasn't able to show you this yet when I showed you the data, but we just got data that shows that in our biadu, one of our studies, we've done four studies to date.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: One has been published, and we have uh we're gonna be publishing the others, but we've actually shown that we can see night and day engraftment and not just on the surface with swabs, but even with dermis squames where we're deep inside, we see like night and day, where you can see the engraftment of these icrobes and actually reduces uh pathogenic microbes, and it you can see the sixteen STAT on there.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, one of the things that the um industry has kind of forgotten about is the fungus.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: That fungus is also part of the microbiome.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we have the data as well that it was mind-blowing, that there was a bunch of malesthesia on these patients, and after eight weeks of biojuve, hardly any.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I was like, what in the world is going on here?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because I didn't know it was that officially.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, museatis is antifungal, but we didn't know how antifungal it is.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So wow, that's really interesting.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then you sort of alluded to the you did some interesting anti-aging studies, the in vitro work looking at some of the biomarkers, and then the clinical study kind of maybe give us a little bit of a nutshell on that.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we've done several clinical studies or four clinical studies to date.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Three of them have been with the Biojuve regimen alone.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: One of them was with a combination of Biojuve plus uh microneedling.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it was with our device that we sell skin pen.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: But um, the idea is we would do the same night, uh the regimen would be the night uh time routine we just talked about.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the morning, basically, again, you could cleanse the face.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't wash my face in the morning.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to get rid of all the microbes that I just cultured.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh then you would put on there's there's uh a couple other products you can choose from.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: One is a um bioessential serum, which is basically the ferment, which is basically all the um the good molecules that the microbes secrete.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's the soup that they grow in.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: So when we produce the microbes, we freeze-dry the microbes, but we keep the soup and put it into the um bioessential serum.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that's basically like if you do choose to wash your face, then you you can put back all the stuff that you just washed off.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's the good stuff.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that's in a product that basically also has a film former.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I put that there because a lot of people were concerned about well, what if I put makeup on?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: What if I put sunscreen on?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is it gonna kill all the microbes that I just you know foster during the night?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of the stuff we use is antimicrobial.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so we put this film former that they typically use for sunscreens for dispersion, and it actually keeps the preservatives and everything out of the skin.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so it makes it to where the skin can actually preserve the microbes, but you can still put on your favorite products after that.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so if you choose to use your other products or if you want to wear makeup, then it won't it will minimally affect the the microbiome where before it probably was doing much more than that.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then on top of that, there's a hydrating barrier cream, which is just basically a microbe-friendly moisturizer and then an SPF that is not necessarily microbe-friendly because it's zinc, it's it's physical, but because you have the film formers on before that, uh, it won't affect the microbes.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, in the clinical study, what we did, the initial one that's published, we had 120 some subjects where we basically had them do that regimen for eight weeks.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we um sampled them before and then at one week, four weeks, and eight weeks.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, some of them were sampled for the micro uh the um 16 S data and stuff that we just discussed, which was night and day.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: But uh in the study that we published, we looked at uh things like um texture, tone, pigmentation, um, under-eye bags, uh laxity, just all the things that you typically look for in aesthetic studies.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we took pictures, redness, you know, all that stuff.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, we found a few things that were quite surprising.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: And one of them was that we we detected less sebum.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that was weird because you know, uh we we there was data that showed that C acne actually causes increase in sebicytes production.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're like, we didn't expect to see less sebum.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And what we realized is it wasn't producing less sebum in the skin.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was that fact that you're putting millions and millions and millions of microbes that eat the sebum.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say they're living off the sebum, right?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: So they're basically eating it, causing the skin to look matte, but also producing all the tarosinase inhibition and the antioxidants and stuff, which is what we wanted.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we we saw the effects of what you would consider um retinoid use.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: We saw all the effects, like the reduction in wrinkles and the reduction of pigmentation and the better texture, and we saw all of that, but we didn't see any irritation.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: We had not one adverse event.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that was when we saw the data, I actually asked when I started looking at the before and afters, I asked my um clinical director if she had photoshopped the picture because I said, I don't this you don't typically see this with a topical, especially not without a retinoid or something.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: And she said she got a little offended, but we were joking.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I wasn't serious, but yeah, uh, you know, it was very quick, eight weeks.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, the the part that was the most fascinating was that we saw the significance started to happen in weeks.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: In one week.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so people were I was I was incredulous at first because I was like, we need to make sure, do some data control, make sure this is all legitimate.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it it was.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've repeated the study a few times and seen the same results each time.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we'll publish more uh as we can.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: But um one of the reasons that I put the preclinical data in the papers because we all know that when we see results in uh clinical research with topicals, we tend to like think it can't be that good, it must be the lighting or this or that.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, I want the preclinical there because it agrees with the clinical and it tells the whole story.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and even the stuff that we're about to release in the near future on the data on this, it's like every time we peel the onion layer back, I get my mind gets blown again.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can't believe that these microbes that we've been trying to kill for decades are some of the most healthy things for us.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I I I think you're making such a great point because we do look at cutie bacterium as a pathogen and it really is a commensal.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously there are strains like defendins that are good for your skin.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's the work that you've done has really revolutionized this whole area of probiotics and topical probiotics.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of companies have tried to peel back the onion, but I think you found a very interesting uh way to go about it that really is, I think patients are going to really benefit from.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I listen, we're getting a little short on time, and you and I could talk for hours because I find you fascinating.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're honored to have you here, and I look forward to sort of watching your journey now as you work with Crown Aesthetics, which ultimately purchased your company, and now you guys are rocking and rolling into the cosmetic space.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank our listeners for listening to Skincare Confidential.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're enjoying the content here, which I'm sure you did today, please subscribe and rate our pod so that we can continue to reach more people and to keep the content coming.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And also, if you have any questions or want to continue the dialogue, or if you have somebody you think would be a good guest for us, you can DM us at Skincare Confidential Podcast or email us at infoscience of skincare summit.com.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings us to our last uh sort of bullet I'd like to say is if you're interested in topical skincare, please join us at the Science of Skin Care Summit.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Hitchcock will be there with us this year.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're super excited.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Austin, Texas, the 21st through the 23rd of September.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a live uh in-person learning experience.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a skincare nerd like I am, and obviously our guest is, you're gonna enjoy our meeting.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the Science of Skincare Summit.com website is up and running, and you can register for the meeting.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: So again, Thomas, thank you.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was a great discussion.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Honored to have you and look forward to having you at the summit this year.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.