Latest / The Science of Skin / The Master of Peptide Science: Dr Alan Widgerow, Chief Scientific Officer for Galderma

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The Master of Peptide Science: Dr Alan Widgerow, Chief Scientific Officer for Galderma · The Science of Skin

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Patty Ferris, and I'm your co-host for this episode of Skin Care Confidential.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: And with me is Hi, I'm Dr.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Ted Lane.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I am Patty's co-host.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are both board-certified dermatologists, and we host this Skin Care Confidential podcast going on almost a year now.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, don't forget to subscribe, share with your friends, and uh today we have such a very special guest.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: We are so excited.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, we are coming to you live from our medical meeting, the Science of Skin Care Summit.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in Austin, Texas, and there's somebody here that we've been wanting to interview.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: He's been on our list for the entire time we've been doing the podcast, but he's hard to pin down because he's a super busy guy, and that's Professor Dr.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Alan Widgerow.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna read his bio to you.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's so impressive.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's a plastic surgeon who ran a solo private practice in South Africa for over 20 years.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: He relocated to Irvine, California in 2009, which probably seems like a long time ago now, huh?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, to pursue interests in medical device innovations, cosmeceuticals, and in wound care.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's currently the chief scientific officer at Galderma, head of Skin Science Institute of Innovation, head of Elastin Innovations.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: What are you not the head of over there?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um He's also the Division Chief for Research Center in Tissue Engineering, and he's professor of plastic surgery at UC Urbine.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome, Alan, and thank you for giving us the time.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm gonna start by asking, I love to hear people's personal stories.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: How did you, as a practicing plastic surgeon, go from the operating room to the bench?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of people start at the bench and end up in medicine, but this is a really circuitous and odd route.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: So tell tell us about that.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's interesting, folks.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think she's trying to say, were you always a molecular biology nerd, or did this sort of evolve with time?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh essentially it did evolve to a certain extent.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I I practiced uh plastic surgery in private practice, uh, mainly an aesthetic practice in the in the last 10 years or so, but practiced in South Africa for 20 years and um left the country for two reasons.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, a security story with my with my kids, but that wasn't the only thing, it was an actualization process.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I decided that um did you want to retire or did you want to rewire?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, it was unfinished business for me for a long time in terms of looking at research and research um elements.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: One of the areas, although I was in in private practice there, I had a tremendous interest in wound healing.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And um related to that, um I developed 13 wound clinics there, and I I watched how the nurses that were involved there got really expert at what they did and really good at what they did.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it was such an incredible science related to it, because it's the basis of all medicine.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: So that became an interest of mine, but not from the not from the side of actually doing the treatments and do the dressings, they were really good at that, but working with a company, so I did a lot of work with Smith and Nephew at the time, they were developing Acticote, uh, nanocrystalline silver for burns, uh, we were doing things on Stephen Johnson syndrome, we were doing various developments, and and that sort of inspired at the back of my mind different um different areas related to research.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: I also had developed a scar product that um I because of the wound healing story, I was very interested in scar control and developed that product, which still goes in South Africa.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then um when I came over here, it was one of the first things that I did was license that out, and that's where I get got to meet Raul, and you know, we licensed it out to Skin Medica at the time.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: But that sort of gave me a different direction.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: So from an actualization process, it was really beautiful to be able to get into the sandpit of looking at basic sciences and starting to get turned on by all the things that we sat in in medical school and thought, oh my god, this is heavy, and I don't know what the hell they're talking about, what's going on.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And now suddenly this becomes the stuff that that makes all the difference.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a long-winded way of answering it, but it it it was a long circuitous course to get there.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I would imagine you're best known for the tri-hex technology.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and so can you take us through the development of Tri-Hex to where it is in nectar and and how you've developed it into your other products as well?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's actually a nice segue.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: So wound healing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when I started in this game and I started talking to uh my colleagues like like you, the you know, the first question is, what's a plastic surgeon doing here talking to us about skincare?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, guys, I'm not talking about skincare, I'm actually talking about wound healing because it's the basis of everything we do.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that slowly evolved, and now that my best friends are dermatologists, so it just sort of naturally evolved into that side of science.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: But from a wound healing perspective, the first real important lesson we learned was platelet-derived growth factor in 1999 was passed by the FDA for diabetic foot ulcers, and we thought this is a game changer.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we took platelet-derived growth factor, put it onto the onto the wound, and in 10 minutes it was gone.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Biggest waste of money ever.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: We decided what's going on, and then we realized that the actual wound was full of proteases, inflammatory enzymes, corrosives that ate through that dressing or therapeutic so quickly.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: So out of that, we bore the new sort of wound bed management principle, which was called time or dime at the time, where you had to look at debriding first, decrease inflammation, increase moisture, stimulate re-epithelization, and only when you're done all of that do you apply the therapeutic.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I looked at this and I thought, you know, there's no better example of a chronic wound than us in terms of the skin in the face.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: We're exposed to photodamage, wear and tear all the time.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: What about bed uh uh skin bed principles rather than wound bed principles?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Surely we have to prep the skin before we're doing procedures and all sorts of things.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So from that, that springboarded me onto okay, if that's true, and I know that in chronic wounds we've got proteases and all these things, what happens in the skin, what accumulates there?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, if we want to put it down to a summary in two words, what we do with most of the things, the products we produce, it's waste management.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Really, what we're looking at is taking the old, recycling it, replacing it with a new.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: And if you replace it with a new, so one of the things we identified, not one of them, but there's fragmentation of collagens, fragmentation of elastin.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Over the age of 35, there's glycation in products that start circulating, causing problems.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about autophagy and the proteosomes.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: Recycling, that becomes a real problem.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, what about taking active constituents, putting them together, and seeing if we can clear out the old and stimulate new replacement of the extracellular matrix, and we call that remodeling the matrix.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what trihex technology is.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: The tripeptide and the hexapeptide, and again, putting them together, they have unique kind of functions.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, what we found is the trihexide tripeptide releases MMP2 gelatinase, that clears out the fragmented collagen and elastin.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: It then stimulates the replacement of new collagen and elastin.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the hexapeptide 12 is an elastin-binding protein, so they work together in replenishing the extracellular matrix.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if that is done, and when you look at the biopsies there, you see that this new collagen, the new elastin is formed.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: We see that the cells now, instead of being senescent and rounded, we talked about this earlier on, those are non-functional.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: They become once again this spindle shape and they can sit on the collagen fiber, and that crosstalk is improved.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Now you go in and you do your resurfacing, whatever it is, the laser, a chemical peel, and you're denaturing collagen.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: That signal from that fragmented collagen stimulates new collagen formation, but only if that extracellular matrix is in a position for that signaling to go through.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the preconditioning that we talk about and recycling the matrix really clears and optimizes the signaling mechanism so that when you do your procedure, you can get the best results.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really what we did.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: So trihex is the one of the areas for the extracellular matrix, but then we added phosphatidyl serine, decrease the MMP1, stimulate procollagen, oleorupin, let's stimulate autophagy and protozo.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: So we looked at all those areas of waste products and said, let's change the milieu and make it actually optimized for healing.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where the principle arrests.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: It makes so much sense.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And you've done so much good work with post-procedure products, and we saw some of those presented today.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: So this is an extension, obviously, of your interest in wound healing.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what what better wound, or I should say, what wound needs to be healed more than a laser resurfacing, or our patients who have chemical peels.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: So talk about that because you've created so many innovative products that we all use in our practices, like enhance, which I think is genius, and um, next generation of that being a molecular garbage man.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 9:07
  unknown: Exactly.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: So so essentially, um, and you're absolutely right, Patty.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: What uh you know, we identified a niche that there was a need for it in terms of the um procedure space.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: What was happening is we were using occlusives, we're using um bland occlusives, particularly at the skin is most vulnerable.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: And everybody was scared to sort of play in that area because the AEs were anticipated this is going to be a reality.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: The downside was really down.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: So when we created this and we looked at the preconditioning, we were convinced that that was working.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: We then looked at raw skin and said, okay, what can we put on there and how do we evolve this?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: And in working with a formulation, uh, and I'm sure you guys know John Gerudo, and you know, John John was involved with TNS right in the beginning, but he's just a formulations expert.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and we looked at this and said, we need a non-aqueous uh application, so it's not going to burn, we need something that's not gonna cause infection, we need something that's gonna optimize healing, we need something that's gonna decrease inflammation, and we managed to put it all in there and have a beautiful, non-smelly um uh formulation that went in and it was absorbed extremely quickly.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that became a real work, working success, and still is today.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's a sort of backbone of everything we do.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Precondition, you're gonna do a procedure, use nectar.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: No matter what you do, if you're injuring the skin, it works beautifully in terms of optimizing.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that's why I smile a little bit when I hear all the claims about the exosomes, we decrease redness, we stimulate healing.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's hello guys, you know, what have we been doing for the last six years?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly what happens.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: We decrease the redness, we stimulate healing, but in a predictable manner, with peptides that we understand that are standardized, that we know have no sort of major secrets out there that we're you know insecure about.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So recently the the C radical defense was introduced, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I really think it should be called C radical offense.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's pretty disruptive.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, I love doing that.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't want to do me twos.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: When I said I was rewiring, uh, and I was very fortunate with elastin, because they let me go with nectar and they saw it was a success, and they said, okay, you know what?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: It seems to be working, go for it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: And whatever we do has to be new science that excites you and you and me, and that we can all talk about it together.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: And there are two sides to it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's innovation, but then there's validation.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the validation that we use is so similar to pharma validation.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing gene expressions, we're doing um in vitros, we're doing ex-vivos, we're doing biopsies, we're doing everything that you would expect from a sort of pharma development, but doing it at a level there where it's suited to the cosmosceutical.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: So from the uh C radical, one of the real things, and when I started with this, you know, my my my friends in the dermatology game said to me, elastin, you're playing around with elastin, playing with fire, because elastin doesn't regenerate.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: You're born with a certain amount.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we're doing.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: You're born with a certain amount, and that's where it stays.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when we started with this, and we still no, we we actually are seeing some stimulation of elastin with the trihex technology.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: We did the biopsies, and I showed the biosies to the guys, and they said, that's solo elastosis.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you've got more elastin the second time, but how do you know that's good elastin versus bad?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, you know, because a valid question.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, good point.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a look at this.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so we started looking at MOVAT stains and a whole lot of different heroicis, MOVATs, CD44s, just a whole range of new stains, particularly focused on early formation.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Where do we see early fibers?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can't argue in the papillary dermis when you've got these fine, beautiful new fibers, that means that there's new stuff forming.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we use that as a backbone to really validate that elastin was indeed forming.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: So elastin's been a pet sort of subject of ours, and whatever we do, we you know, we use the elastin sort of framework.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm always hunting around for new things on elastin.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was I happened to be doing a search on elastin binding proteins because hexapeptides are an elastin binding protein.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I found some work by Alexander Hennek, who's a uh a scientist in Toronto, and he was doing some work related to uh blood vessels and cardiovascular work, because as we know, with aging of the vessels, they lose elastin, and and that starts affecting it.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: But they don't want to replace collagen, they want to replace elastin.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I followed his work and I saw that his his patent really related to using sodium ascorbate together with probenicid.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Probenicid was stopping the collagen formation, and sodium ascorbate was stimulating elastin.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Oh, that's interesting.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I went back to one of his postdocs and I read his thesis.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And in the 150 pages of the thesis, there were two sentences in there that caught my eye.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it's that alascorbate is destructive to tropoelastin, and sodium ascorbate actually is protective to elastin.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that just blew my mind.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: I thought, what?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: We've been using al-ascorbate for years with vitamin C.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: And basically, you know, we knew we had to do uh certain concentrations, we knew there were pH problems, there were all sorts of things that was unstable.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: This could be really interesting.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what actually stimulated this thought process, and we went into it and and and formulated something with a whole lot of antioxidants, but then really focusing on the elastin story.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we did an ex fever model, and lo and behold, when we tested one of the leading sort of um uh um uh formulations on the market, we found that there were a little moth-eaten appearances in the tropoelastin.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it appears that the mr the tropoelastin mRNA is sensitive to aloscorbate, which is the sort of basis of all the vitamin C's that we use.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody's ever highlighted this, nobody's talked about elastin in the vitamin C and vitamin C and elastin in the same in the same breath.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then when we used our sodium ascorbate or we used our C radical, we saw that it was actually what we thought was protective.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: We then did our clinical studies by oxide 5 out of 5 patients out of the 37 that we did.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: Five out of five had huge stimulation of elastin.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't only protective, but the sodium ascorbate, which is used in tiny percentages compared to what we used to use, was stimulating elastin.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: So we had a very nice product that worked very, very nicely on the antioxidant, but the whole new disruption was hang on, we can now stimulate collagen and elastin at the same time and have an antioxidant.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the basis of the new product now.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that the sodium ascorbate is going to have as good or as high of an antioxidant effect and efficacy within the epidermis and dermis as the leading brand?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: And and why I think that is because we're not relying on sodium ascorbate alone.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually adding 14 other really potent.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: We've got ergothionines, we've got lactoferins, we've got all the traditional sort of stories which I already looked up and said, how much research is there on these?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, lactoferin is an interesting one, and I keep coming back to it because we talked about it on the panel today.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: But this plasmin inhibitor, it's so interesting because it's also an iron chelator.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: So for postmenopausal women that collect iron, this is really good.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: An antioxidant, it's good because it's this chelator.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you know, that's in there.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got 14 antioxidants as well.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: So we know, and we tested it against the leading brand.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in terms of we tested in Brazil, and we found that there was substantial equivalence from the antioxidant side, but the difference was on the elastic and conservation.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is it photolabile at all?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: So it's absolutely stable.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to worry about the the container and the package, you don't have to worry about the pH, you don't have to worry about the concentration, you can use it morning and night.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: All the sort of things that we're insecure about with the conventional vitamin C have gone by the wayside with this.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's not tacky, it's not smelly, it's easy to apply.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds good to be true.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so there's no issue with penetration being a salt and not being an acid.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: No, and and that's a great question.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: And when one thinks about it, the vitamin C receptors are sodium dependent.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I had this sort of aha moment.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, let's use the sodium salt or vitamin C because the sodium will unlock the cell and allow their score bait to get in.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's why we use such a tiny dose.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a range, you can only use that tiny dose.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: It gets in there and it's really effective.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: We did surround it with a liphosome, but it gets in very easily.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's protected, it's stable.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we particularly looked at those areas.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: If we wanted to use uh one of the other products that you have in the line along with it, it's layered over.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: This comes first?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, depending on which one you're using.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got three different serums.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: We've got the HAMERS, which is beautiful for hyaluronic acid.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if there are pigmentation problems, we've got the aluminate, we've got um, and and we've got this.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, they're all more or less the same sort of story.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: I would use the HAMERS first.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's a thinnest cousine very quickly, it's beautiful.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: I would then use this, then I would use the aluminate, and then I would use the restorative skin complex, depending on what you want to treat and how you want to do this.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: But they layer very education who's using retinoids because we use so many of them growth.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: No question, because that used to be also a problem.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: And not a problem.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: Use it at night, use it with a retinoid, it's not a problem.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's amazing.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it really gives a lot of versatility.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it does have great versatility from that perspective.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's so interesting.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, again, with a waste product story.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we created a waste product in terms of the damage to the tropoelastin.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: So again, what we're doing now is reversing that process.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I keep coming back to the same theme, but that's what it is.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, um looking at beta amyloid and tau protein and all that, that's what it's all about.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get rid of the products of metabolism or of that disease process and let's replace it and try and get things going.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the same philosophy we use.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Out with the old, in with the new.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe just sort of in concluding, where do you see?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, cosmeceuticals have exploded.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: You you you alone have contributed massive amounts of science and innovation.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you see us going?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: We heard all this exosome talk today with regenerative medicine meeting cosmetics.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what do you think about all of it?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you see us going?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you may be surprised by this answer, but uh, I don't think the answers in biologics, to be absolutely honest.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think the answers in synthetic biologics.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, with exosomes, you know, Raul, everybody talked today about uh not knowing the cargo.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is the biggest problem because you really don't know what's in there.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not only SIRNAs, mIRNAs, lipids, proteins, there's a whole stream of things.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: The source is important.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not even sure embryonic source.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: Embryonic is, yes, hugely regenerative, but is that really what you want when you're applying it to your skin cells?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody's looking.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: There was one study that I saw that uh Todd presented related caratinocytes, but I'm very interested in exosomes from caratnocytes.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: But more than that, I'm interested in identifying the cargo and developing those mIRNAs, lipids, and proteins in a synthetic way that's predictable, and I know what the indication is and I know what the effect is.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: That makes so much sense.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's where I think we're gonna get the same.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, we understand it's a great carrier molecule, right?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a carrier vesicle.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: We want to bioengineer what's in them and allow them to do their thing.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Makes sense.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the one side.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: The other side is we don't know if we apply, and that's some of the work we're doing now, if you apply a peptide, can you change the nature of that exosome from an old to a new?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: We've heard all the time that the milieu is completely dependent on the milieu, the way that the exosome works.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, let's change the milieu like we've been doing forever with a peptide, and let's see if the exosome changes.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you need to dump the biologic with all its sort of potential problems there when you've got something synthetic?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the area that I think we're going to explode in.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: So interesting.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have one more question, if I may.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Go for it.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: There are many people in the audience or who will be listening who are so interested in your story and thinking they may have an idea.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: They may have a desire to start a skincare line, they may just have an idea for innovation.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: What would what are your kind of best clue hints or or kind of pearls of wisdom that you can give someone that that may want to follow in your footsteps?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'll answer that in two ways.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: Number one is as a physician, I just I just wrote a paper that's been accepted in JDD.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Designing a peptide from a physician's perspective, because that's exactly what I did.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: And in our HAMERS, we have an octapeptide 45 that's proprietary.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: I really designed this by looking at elastin and collagen and look at the amino acid sequence.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I had an aha moment.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: I said, by God, 75% of these amino acids are exactly the same.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's just the variation between there.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I started mixing and matching and seeing what was available, making sure my doltins were low, and I developed this kind of story, thinking it's going to work on the extracellular matrix.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing about hyaluronic acid was in my head at the time.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And to cut a long story short, this developed into something that became a beautiful, massively generating hyaluronic acid from fibroplasts.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: High molecular weight, low inflammatory.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that was great.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: So is it possible to do?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's possible to do.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, my last sentence in there is that sometimes it's better to be lucky than to be skillful.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's a there's a lot of truth in that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the second part of that is if you're gonna do this, just surround yourself with experts in the game.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because I said this earlier on there's innovation, and ideas are plenty.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's easy to have the ideas.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's the validation and knowing that you're validating this.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: There's huge competition.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: This is this is not a small uh field, and so there should be, and so there should be a lot of scientific validation.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And if you are going to do that, make sure you have a team that is gonna be backing you up with true science and take the hype down and take the science up.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing, yes.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us for this episode.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And and you did not disappoint.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: For everybody listening out there, Dr.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Alan Widgerow from Alastin, and thanks so much for tuning in.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're enjoying this content, please subscribe.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Share, subscribe, give us a five-star rating as well while you're at it.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.