194. Beauty Is in the AI of the Beholder: Debut’s Joshua Britton Turns Claims into Molecules

Joshua beauty is this beautiful battleground. I didn't come from the industry, but it is vicious, it's exciting. You are winning on performance. Like biology will take on chemistry.

Joshua if you wanna learn like how to be in synthetic biology and battle and market and sell and scale, like there is no industry like it. It's just amazing.

Erum Hey, Carl. How's it going?

Karl things are going great, Erum. What about you?

Erum I was trying to look for you yesterday. where were you?

Karl I had to go to the movies.

Erum Oh, really? what did you see?

Karl So I went to go see the new Spider-Man, which I thought was really pretty damn good. and there was some good biotech in it

Erum Oh, tell us more because this is the Grow Everything podcast where we talk about how biology is transforming every industry, and here we are in the movie industry.

Karl Tell us, I mean, everybody knows the Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man story. he gets bitten by a s- radioactive spider, and then later on it becomes a genetically engineered spider. And in this new [00:01:00] Spider-Man with Tom Holland, in this particular episode, Brand New Day, the spider DNA starts to take over.

Karl He has this computer that's telling him what's wrong with him, and the hormone levels are changing into arachnid levels. And so he has to develop a device that silences mRNA so that he remains more of a balanced person, and less a spider. and like the description of it was pretty good.

Karl He was inspired by Bruce Banner, who is the Hulk, and the Hulk makes an appearance in this movie. I'm not spoiling anything for anybody.

Erum Are you sure?

Karl Hopefully.

Erum I was like gonna say, I'm like, wait, maybe that's just the, the bio plot.

Karl Yeah, the bio plot is a subplot.

Karl I think part of the Peter Parker as Spider-Man story is always like he reaches a point where he has to grapple with his humanity versus his arachnid ness, and, that happens to happen in this particular,[00:02:00] movie or this episode in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Karl and it was kind of cool because, like, he has this apartment, in the top of this building. I did not like the street that they made his New York street. Like, I thought that was a little bit fake.

Erum Was his apartment rent stabilized?

Karl Yeah, we don't know. He has like the top floor of a building

Karl and he has like this four to eight monitor setup. And then there's a couple of, scenes where, like, they show the differences between his hormone levels, human versus spider, but then there's one screen that has like the classic gel electrophoresis proteins being moved across a space and I was like, "Oh, that's a good nod to the science," besides the whole, you know, mRNA silencing.

Karl So I am a huge Spider-Man fan. He's my favorite superhero. And, Spider Man movies especially, most of them take place in New York City. I think they're all love letters to New York City, and this one in particular is like, just makes you happy to be a New Yorker.

Erum Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I am getting [00:03:00] into Spider Man, reintroduced through my son.

Erum He doesn't call him Spider-Man, he calls him Spidey, 'cause there's the, young version, the young cartoons but I have read about it recently because, you were watching pop culture. I love that they have bio in the mainstream.

Erum This is what we're also trying to do with this podcast, to have more people understand what's happening in the world of biotech and what the tools are, and what you can do, and what's possible. I have been reading The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is about, like, s- 600 pages. I'm 300 pages in.

Erum They do talk about, Spider-Man and X-Men, and how that started helping people understand about the possibilities of, genetic engineering or even just mutations in general, like just people getting mutations whether they're bit by bugs or other means. Just like, and I thought that was very interesting.

Erum Not as exciting as watching, a movie on the big screen. 600-page book is a bit different, but I'm still getting through it. It's so fascinating though, and it's all [00:04:00] about, the history of, of biology and genetics and how it ca- how it has come to be. and now we're getting closer to, modern day and it's very interesting, which I will talk more about probably later when I finish it.

Erum I have been taking notes, so we can do a, a quick recap.

Karl you're my hero for reading that book because- ... it's kind of sitting there on my shelf. It's been there for a long time. I have never cracked it open because it's just, like, intimidating. I'm more likely to pick up Don Quixote or Gravity's Rainbow, which are also 600 to 800-page novels, than I am that book.

Karl But at some point I will also read it, so I can't wait to hear your notes on it.

Erum Yep, yep. Just doing what I gotta do to, to make sure- ... we have some good content on this podcast. And this particular episode is a continuation/transition of our bio dye series. And people are like, "Iram, you've been learning a lot about colors.

Erum You and Carl have been talking about it all the time. You [00:05:00] have all these amazing people on. Why are you so fascinated by, food dye and colors?" And I'm like, "Well, first of all, colors are cool." I mean, obviously, we're visual beings and, we're always on. When our eyes are open, you're seeing colors.

Erum and obviously we're visual eaters. and we talked about, how food is, and color's really important to the eating experience. It's, very sensory. but also the main reason is because the whole bio manufacturing of dyes is a playbook for other biotech ingredients to be made, and there are a lot of- Tailwinds around it because of the regulatory reasons.

Erum This is like right now a poster child for starting to reformulate the products we have on our shelves away from toxic or ineffective ingredients that just, are mundane and subpar, but we could ramp it up with biology. you know, our favorite one being in the biotech beauty [00:06:00] space, K18 Hair has their peptide, which I love.

Erum I mean, you haven't commented on my hair, Carl, so I'm really offended right now.

Karl Irham, did you just get your hair done this week or something?

Erum Yes.

Karl Yesterday. Well, it looks fa- it looks fabulous. Thank

Erum you. Thank you.

Karl It's got a lot of green. For our listeners, you need to go and watch the video on YouTube.

Erum All right. Again, you're forgiven. It's

Karl more green than it was before.

Erum yes. I'm going green. but yeah. It's just, K18 has wonderful products that really help with creating, virgin hair after you have to dye it, 'cause I have to have, get my hair bleached in order to get this color and it's just, the stylists that I worked with were like, "Oh my gosh, this is so great.

Erum We need to use all these products to make sure it, it pops and your hair's healthy," and it works. So

Karl I'm glad you said all that about the food dyes and you mentioned K18, and I think one of our big lessons from K18, and there were many and there continue to be many, K18 has like now introduced a set of scalp longevity products which we're really interested in diving into.

Karl But formulating [00:07:00] products with biology is fundamentally different than formulating them with chemistry, and so we kind of have to relearn how to make products, and I think that's really fascinating and I think it's something that we're gonna keep coming back to over and over again in this podcast because we wanna see more biotech ingredients and formulating with them is challenging and different, but better.

Karl Performance is gonna be different. So we're talking about dyes, bio dyes. It could be in many cases like a bio dye could end up being a preservative, so you end up replacing a bunch of other ingredients. So I love that we've done this and I'm looking forward to bringing more people who are formulating with biology into the podcast because I think there's a lot to be said there.

Erum continuing to do these bio dye series, and we decided to also play around a little bit with food dye and experimenting in that realm.

Erum So we recently did this, taste test video where we were tasting Different types of chips, those with dyes and [00:08:00] those without.

Erum Particularly the Doritos or the Cheetos brand called Simply Naked, and those are the chips that have no dyes, and we compared it to the ones that do. You wanna talk a little bit more about this, Carl?

Karl Yeah. So I...

Erum you need to go and watch us doing it. It's a lot of fun. we were blindfolded. Lizette, our assistant producer, was in there feeding us the chips.

Karl She was the one who knew what she was giving us, whether it was the chips or the it was a fun experience. I'm a Doritos expert and huge fan. I don't eat them very often. You remember you went to a party and they had Doritos out recently.

Erum Yeah. Because in my friend groups, like we, all try to eat healthy, but, if there's a party, we'll slip.

Erum Not slip- ... but, like we'll eat whatever. And they bought, like, this huge bag of Doritos, and it was the first thing to go. Everyone ate it.

Karl People love Doritos. So you need to go and watch the video, but what's been great about this is we've [00:09:00] been starting to get a lot of comments from our listeners and, I guess, our fans.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. So we had posted this, and of course we'll have, a link in the show notes. but one of our collaborators who we had on recently, Assundi of the Smart Tea Podcast,

Erum said that, "It's fascinating that removing dye actually seems to change the taste. the NKD Hot Cheetos would definitely lull me into a false sense of security. It will be interesting to see how Doritos finds an alternative dye to use." and I think it's real interesting, so you'll have to see the video, but, if you remove the dye from something that's very hot that traditionally was bright red, and you see something bright red, you're like, "Hmm,

Erum I might proceed with caution." But if that r- color is removed and you eat something and it's spicy, you'd feel like you were bamboozled. I don't know. You're like, "Wait, what?"

Karl Yeah. You made the point, after we had tasted the, the Cheetos, that some people might, see them [00:10:00] at a party and think they're white Cheetos and eat them, and then all of a sudden it's too spicy for them.

Karl I, as someone who loves really spicy food, would find that hard to believe because they're not that spicy, but I could see people feel- being fooled

Erum Yeah. that is true. And then we also had a couple more comments. Wanted to give a shout-out to Jessie Adler. she said about the video, "The difference is really quite dramatic with the Flaming Hot Cheetos.

Erum Agree that color is key in signaling spiciness and flavor. Loving the Bio Dye series." Thank you so much, Jessie, for saying that. and finally, quick shout-out to Ashley Marin, who just said, "I love you guys." So- We love

Karl you too, Ashley.

Erum We love you too. Amazing.

Karl Yeah. So the, all of that, I mean, listeners, go and

Karl Watch and comment and let us know what you think of our little Doritos and Cheetos experiment. It was a lot of fun to do that, and we need to do that more often. Like, there's, more of these biotech products are out there. We need more people to be exposed to them.

Karl the Cheetos and the [00:11:00] Doritos are not a biotech product, though I do think they use genetically engineered corn, and they make that very clear on their labels. But, I had a lot of fun with that, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Now, Iram, have you heard about this new imaginary color?

Erum No. I mean, you shared that with me, and I'm so curious, first of all, how it came to your purview, and wow, I just...

Erum I'm s- excited to learn more about this.

Karl Okay. So there's a new color. It's called OLO, which is such a funny name.

Erum Love it.

Karl And apparently you can only see it using specialized tools, that activate certain cells on the retina. You can't see this with the naked eye, because it's too close to green But,this was just recently discovered last year, by scientists at UC Berkeley.

Karl And, apparently people are able to see it if the experimental conditions are the same. It looks like a blue-green color that is super, super saturated. I think it's really beautiful. We'll [00:12:00] put a link in the show notes. But, I mean, having a new color discovered while we talk about, the bio dye color series, and I think that green...

Karl I don't know, Iram, is that the color you were aiming for with your hair?

Erum Yeah, I want some Olo hair. yeah. I mean, It just gets so fascinating 'cause you're like, "Wait, imaginary color? They discovered something imaginary?" It's like ... And this is-- I mean, I love science. This is why, because it's not over, right?

Erum Science.

Karl It's not e- we're not even close to being

Erum over. We're not even close to being-

Karl Well, but, and like the other thing that- There's so much ... it reminded me of is like, animals, dogs, cats, birds, mammals have different ways of seeing. They have different concentrations of cells in their retinas.

Karl Are they able to see this Olo color? there used to be an exhibit at the boathouse in the Prospect Park, and you could put your head into, like, a big bird, andit was set up so that you could see the field of vision that a bird would have.

Karl You couldn't see the colors, but a bird's field of vision is very different from ours because [00:13:00] their eyes typically are on the sides of their head. And, a lot of animals have- eyes on the side of their head. So, what animal is able to see this holocolor?

Erum Yeah. I mean, I always think about the limitations that we have as humans with vision and taste and all of our senses, very limited.

Erum We can only see a very thin slice of the, the visible spectrum, so what else is going on outside of it that we can't see? And, we are starting to build instrumentation to be able to see it, just like being able to discover this imaginary color. But what other instruments do we need to see to collect the type of information?

Erum because it paints a broader picture of reality. You know, our reality we can only experience in such a limited way. But, there's more to be seen and done and, we're working towards it, and biotechnology is one of those tools to help us uncover what's new and amazing and what we could do with it.

Karl Yeah. And to bring it back to Spider-Man.

Erum Okay.

Karl [00:14:00] I'm just thinking about like, biologically enhanced human or digitally enhanced humans. How do you enhance our field of vision so that we can see more of those colors? I mean, that is something that happens in comic books and science fiction. So I know it's just a matter of time before we're probably able to do those kinds of things.

Erum Oh, yeah. I mean, well, augmented reality is kind of in that realm, night vision, I don't know if x-ray vision, I mean, there's a lot. but how do we do it in a way that's safe? I don't know how x-ray vision if you could put that into glasses. But anyway, we're, this is what we do.

Erum We go down these rabbit holes, but we'll bring it back. we're professional. We're bringing it back. All

Karl right. So let's bring it back to today's guest. I'm super excited, and we've been wanting to get Joshua Britton of Debut on the podcast for a really long time, and so we're very excited that we're finally able to schedule him.

Karl By way of background,Joshua started,Debut, on this thesis that AI and biotech could [00:15:00] discover and manufacture high-performance ingredients that had never been created before and that could be used to redefine beauty innovation. you saw Joshua speak at SynBio Beta. I missed that talk, but he's been on our list for a really long time.

Karl Joshua has a post-doc from MIT, got his PhD at UC Irvine, and, studied at the University of, Nottingham. He has been named, Vogue Business 100 Innovators, Debut is one of TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies, and he received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Pacific Southwest in 2024.

Karl With that, let's let Joshua take it away

Erum Joshua Britton of Debut, welcome to the Grow Everything podcast. We're so excited to have you, finally.

Joshua Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm sorry about the, the time, but yeah, I'm really excited to be here today.

Erum Yes. We've been looking at what's been going on with Debut. I heard you speak at SynBio [00:16:00] Beta c- maybe a couple years ago, talk- you know, you're on stage with L'Oréal, another partner, and it was so great to hear the beginnings and the journey, and now we're here to share it with our audience.

Erum So we would love to first start about your background a little bit. So you're trained in pure organic chemistry across many institutions, Nottingham, UC Irvine, MIT. We would love to learn a little bit more about what made you realize that the future of molecular creation, which is what you do, belongs to AI and biotech rather than traditional chemistry?

Joshua That's a really good question. And yeah, thanks for having me. So I think for me, it really became apparent when I started going into more complex natural product creation and, joining the labs that did this. And in those labs, people would spend, five, 10, 15 years trying to create these like very complex molecules found in nature.

Joshua And it was actually at UC Irvine and yet then followed by MIT, where I started to spend a lot more time with the [00:17:00] biologists in these institutions. And the biologists were creating these exact same molecules in five days, right, via biology. They were just letting nature run its course. And yet, on the opposite side of the campus, in the chemistry schools, you had people dedicating their whole PhDs to a few steps in which enzymes could just do.

Joshua So that became the first eye-opening moment that something I would spend years on could be done by just growing up a culture of E. coli, right? And so that, I think that was the first thing. I think the second thing then was just, chemistry had always been such a prevalent part of my life, through the training, through, you know, when I started,in, 2009, going through the academic institutions.

Joshua Biology really didn't have that much knowledge behind it. It was still kind of coming out of its shell, if you will. By the time I kind of hit full flight through PhDs and postdocs, biology was taking over the world, right? People understood biology. they could harness it, they could use it, they could really dream with it.

Joshua And so it was that convergence right at that [00:18:00] point where I decided, why are we spending all this money, time, energy and talent going after molecules that biology can do super well, easily, better than chemists? And at the end of the day, nature is just smarter than synthetic chemists, right? So we've got to harness it.

Karl Yeah. That's amazing. just a question, when you were at UC Irvine, did you, deal at all with Douglas Tobias?

Joshua he was in the same school, but I was under Professor Greg Weiss, who, was at UCI, is now at NYU. But Greg's lab was at the exact intersection of, chemistry and biology, and so half of it was chemistry, half of it was biology.

Joshua And I still remember that, like, the first days of going to his lab and having to use a micropipette for the first time. And he was like, "How has this not been a thing that you've been able to do before in your career?" And it really was that like crossover. But yeah, Tobias, he's great.

Karl Yeah. He was a roommate and good friend of mine in college.

Karl So you've argued that the true promise of biomanufacturing requires total vertical integration. why is this traditional biotech [00:19:00] model, of licensing a single molecule to external brands flawed?

Joshua You know, it's, it's probably the biggest question we get asked, right?

Joshua if you do go back like five, seven years ago, there was kind of two camps that broke out. There was the horizontally integrated companies, of which there was tons, right, and there was the vertical ones. And when we first started coming through the system for the, through the venture capital system, people were like, "Eh, it looks like horizontal's gonna win."

Joshua But for us, we were privileged enough to kind of grow up behind Ginkgo, Amyris, ZymeGen, right? And we could see the mistakes they, made and then the difficulties of really trying to take the promise of biology and deliver it to the masses. And so for us, there was a few things that we didn't like.

Joshua The, the first is that, like biology is easy to engineer now, right? You have kids doing it. You have kids engineering biology. There are thousands of people going through the university system. so the problem is no longer engineering biology. Everyone can engineer biology. It's easy. the harder things that we always saw was no matter if you could [00:20:00] scale the technology, which I don't think is a problem anymore, you could make the ingredient, it always became on how to ship the ingredient, formulate the ingredient, how to sell biotech to the consumer via the brand.

Joshua So it just opened up different set of problems. And for us, we had to think about those problems very early on, which was it doesn't matter if you can make an ingredient, it doesn't matter if you can scale an ingredient with biology. If the brand isn't ready to receive it or can use it or can speak to it to their consumer, that's the real roadblock, because otherwise no one's gonna purchase it and therefore the company's not gonna get revenue, and it's just kind of that vicious cycle So we very early on at Debut kind of made that decision that we don't believe horizontal integration works.

Joshua we kind of looked more towards the incumbents that are really successful, right? So if you look at DSM, Cargill, ADM, like Slavia, like these companies, they are synthetic biology companies. They just don't [00:21:00] scream and shout about it from the rooftops, right? But they are vertically integrated. They will go all the way from discovery to fermentation optimization, to production, to, to formulation, to selling the ingredient, to helping it with their clients.

Joshua Like it, it really was the full gamut. And so for us it was about leaning more towards that model away from horizontal. I don't think it's necessarily that, if you have an amazing asset like, Botox, right? You can definitely create an incredible business model around Botox, but the problem that we felt with synthetic biology was everyone goes after ingredients that are known, that are already made with petroleum, that are already made through other causes.

Joshua And so there's not really a high demand for why are you making it with synthetic biology? And that's why we leaned into the AI discovery aspect. That's why we always thought it was very important to own our own ingredients, because for us, if we have the highest performing ingredient, people wanna work with us.

Joshua Brands wanna include it in their products. They wanna stand

[00:22:00] out, they want the customers to be happy. And it just so happened that the ingredients that we were discovering were best made via synthetic biology. So like a very different way of looking at kind of the landscape, if you will, across synthetic biology, but I think it was really important for us in the early days.

Erum Wow. Yeah. I love that positioning. I mean, we like to talk about, the go-to-market. a lot of companies that we meet, they just focus so much on the technology. There was this one company, they were like, "Yeah, we put, 95% of all of our money into the technology. Now we only have, like, a little bit of money for marketing.

Erum Can you help us for $4?" And you're like- Yeah. ... that's gonna be very challenging." the better bet would've been to, save out, like, a larger chunk, prove out your market, get that all established, then go back and work on your technology. So.

Joshua you actually get it, right?

Joshua I mean, one of the things we talk about at a board level is one of the most important things in this scientific transition from chemistry to biology is the scientific communication of the things you are creating, right? And

[00:23:00] scientific communication of fermentation and AI and is really difficult.

Joshua And, and ultimately, if the brands who you're selling to cannot get that message in a value added way and convey it to their customers, it doesn't matter what you're making. It doesn't matter if it's through fermentation. It doesn't matter if we're having this synbio moment, because ultimately no one will purchase it and no one will make money, right?

Joshua So yeah, I totally agree with you. Like, the go-to-market is so vital.

Erum Yeah. It always makes me think about how many amazing innovations are on the shelf because no one was able to talk about it. it's like, ah. but I would love

Erum to talk a little bit more about these novel molecules you guys are discovering.

Erum Can you help our listeners visualize what Debut is actually creating on the consumer side? Tell us a little bit more about these ingredients and this physical experience that comes from these ingredients.

Joshua really about four years ago, we had a, come to Jesus moment whereby we could see that the synbio industry was gonna start going downhill because it was just too [00:24:00] broad. People were making stuff that no one cared about, right?

Joshua And so we doubled down into beauty so, so hard. So like 99% of everything we do now is beauty, and beauty is such a great, first market entrance to synthetic biology because the volumes are slightly lower, people care about performance, everyone's kind of understanding beauty biotech. And so it's a really good learning ground for both the scientific communication aspect, but also getting that high margin, reoccurring revenue that's plagued this industry for so long, right?

Joshua So we doubled down into beauty, and then the biggest lesson that we kind of took from that is that we always have to start with the consumer claim in mind. So, for us, when we create synthetic biology pipelines, it's never, "Let's go to literature, let's find out what's good from academia, and let's put it into yeast and make it," right?

Joshua It really starts with a lot of the consumer understanding. So working with L'Oréal, working with Image, working with quite literally tens if not hundreds of brands now, we understand what does the consumer [00:25:00] want, what is not available or what is not working or could be better. Like these are key questions.

Joshua And so we have really great people from the beauty industry on our team, and we understand the 14 hallmarks of aging or reduction in redness or, anti-dandruff or whatever it is, those are the targets then. And then we'll work with our AI ingredient discovery platform to screen, 100 billion potential molecules computationally.

Joshua And then once we find the molecules, we then choose how to make it, and that could be via enzymatic catalysis, it could be via fermentation, it could be via E. coli, yeast or mammalian. Like it's-- for us, synthetic biology is just one of, a, a really great manufacturing tool to create ingredients that are difficult to make at low cost and high volume And so that's really a little bit about our process from like working with the brand, like, like image for the skin tightening ingredient, in this post-Ozempic era.

Joshua It was, post-Ozempic rapid weight loss. We saw there was a lot of

[00:26:00] like call for brands trying to address like the under neck area, the face area, the body area, but there was no ingredient, to do this. A- and it goes back to what we said earlier about like the evolution of chemistry to biology, which is like, well, now actually there is so much great research on biology of skin.

Joshua and like if I remember 15 years ago when I was coming through the system, if you were the best chemist in the world, you always wanted to work in pharma, right? You-- If you're the best chemist in the world, you never went, "I wanna work at a beauty company." And that's kind of changing now because like the hallmarks of aging are coming through.

Joshua There's longevity science, and it's kind of exciting and like there's so much good knowledge coming out about beauty right now that you do then get the ability to create these kind of cool solutions. And so that's a bit about our workflows and,it really always starts with what is the consumer demanding and how do we take that through?

Joshua 'Cause if we follow that workflow, then we know that by the time we get to the other end, if it's clinically backed and it works and we can go through that area, there's [00:27:00] already customers. We don't have to play the game that most synthetic biology companies play, which is like, let's go and find customers.

Joshua The customers influence the pipeline. More like pharma.

Karl Yeah. I mean, we, have been lucky to have, played our part and continue to play a part in biotech beauty, and I've always found it to be like such a fascinating area because, as you say, Joshua, it moves super fast. There's consumer demand and,there's trends.

Karl So you might launch something today that works really well, has high performance, but the trend might change and then, depending on what that product is, you can reformulate it so that it kind of follows a trend. So I think that there's like infinite opportunity, and especially as we talk about longevity, you talked about this post Ozempic world where people want skin tightening.

Karl All those things are just, I think of beauty as being mano a mano in the streets fighting for the next great ingredient, you know?

Joshua you've got that absolutely right. people have the misconception that some synthetic biology companies go into beauty because it's lower [00:28:00] volume and, easier.

Joshua It's not really the case, it's just people end up in beauty because there is demand for the innovation of which synthetic biology can demand, right? And again, you kind of see these two camps of people going, "No, the hardest thing is the biology and the scaling." And we're like, "That's not hard.

Joshua What's hard is getting consumer demand, because once you have that, you'll work out how to scale it pretty quickly," right? it's that. But yeah, beauty is this beautiful battleground. I didn't come from the industry, but it is vicious, it's exciting. You are winning on performance. Like biology will take on chemistry.

Joshua if you wanna learn like how to be in synthetic biology and battle and market and sell and scale, like there is no industry like it. It's just amazing.

Karl one of the things that I think, you've touched on this, but what happens is you move complex biological processes out of an academic lab, for example MIT, and then you turn it into a commercial enterprise.

Karl Were there any like big failures or technical walls that you hit that ultimately forged a breakthrough that you could share with our audience?

Joshua Yeah. I think the biggest failures that we had were like Series A, right? And that's what we meant to fail. We meant to push, push and fail.

Joshua And the failures that we had just told us that the horizontal business models were never gonna work. And, so we spent time and talent going after, ingredients that we found in academic literature, which were meant to have these amazing properties. Like, and this is happening again.

Joshua You see these like new wave of companies coming through just making the same stuff, like making the same mistakes again. But so we spend like, a year and a half. We get the titters up, we isolate it, we purify it, we do like the preclinical and we're excited, and then we put it in a cosmetic formula and it degrades like that.

Joshua Or, or you can't formulate it and you get these like bitty crystals. And so, God, it's so difficult then because what you've done, you've invested into a process. People are like, "Oh, we can make it at this cost. That's great." But again, it goes towards like the supply chain, the formulation, the consumer understanding.

Joshua Can it make a beautiful product that people [00:30:00] repeat and come back for, right? And so that was like the biggest wall for us, spending a lot of time going after multiple assets that were just were never gonna work. And these are assets that people are still working on now. And so it told us a few things.

Joshua It told us first, consumer end in mind, very early on in the process. Are we doing formulation testing? We're doing stability testing. We're doing more of like the use of the ingredient in the end product, because ultimately if that doesn't work, it doesn't matter how you make it. No one cares.

Joshua And so, yeah, that, that was one of the, the biggest things for us once we hit that wall, we brought in formulation chemists and then Once you could formulate it, we were happy. And then the question became, okay, well, if people are just copying the same molecules from literature, every company on earth can do that, so we need to discover our own one.

Joshua So we brought in, like the discovery teams, the pre-clinical teams, the clinical teams, and that became like our vertical process from discovery to can we formulate with it? Okay, now we've got the two big check marks and we know it's good. How do we make [00:31:00] it? How do we scale it? How do we sell it?

Joshua And so naturally, I think you see how just, hitting these walls kind of required more of a, a vertical nature.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. that is true. Yeah, because you have to have that, the DBTL from lab to scale. and I'm really interested in, the AI that you guys are using, looking at billions of molecules, look for novel ingredients in like minutes or seconds.

Erum Then you still have this, the world of physical biology and that takes, months to test and scale. So how do you manage that, the massive friction between digital speed and physical reality? And then also like how vertically integrated is the AI now or how can it be? fully integrated.

Joshua Yeah. It's, God, what a fascinating topic of conversation right now, right? You kind of see everyone breaking out with it. So for us, we used AI because when we went to the discovery side, we knew that there were roughly 100 [00:32:00] billion small molecules that we needed to test. And even with like high-speed robotics, that would be tens of years to do it.

Joshua So I came up more through like the chemistry side, the pharma side, and in that you use quantitative structure-activity relationships, or QSARs, to look at a chemical structure to an effect, right? And so for us, that's where we decided we were gonna invest. We were gonna create the datasets first, the high-fidelity datasets to map structure to function, and then we'd use machine learning first and then graduate into AI to relate structure to function.

Joshua And so if someone came to us and they said, "We really want this function, we want this molecule to do inflammation and skin tightening," we could then go back in and kind of say, "These are the molecules," right? So for us, it was never about using AI just to like speed up work or, like just because it was AI.

Joshua we did this about three and a half years ago, and it was purely the need on for Debut to be successful, we always have to have the [00:33:00] highest performing ingredient in market, and we can only do that if we can discover new ingredients. And so that, that's how we do it. Now, the interesting thing you said about the friction between like computation and testing is, again, I always-- like there's two camps, right, emerged again, which is like people are saying that, the labs of the futures are robotic instruments and high throughput thing, and like in our opinion, that's just a blip.

Joshua we're getting to a point now where our computational models require less and less lab testing because they're coming better and better, right? And so when we fast-forward 10 years into the future into this- there's not so much wet lab testing anymore. There will always be wet lab testing for the candidates which come from it, but, the companies who are building like infrastructure to test, millions and millions, well, they'll create the data sets to do the computational workflows, but ultimately they will not be needed in the future.

Joshua And so that's how we think about it. Right now, yes, we have to test thousands of candidates, but every time we do [00:34:00] this with new customers, it goes from 10,000 to 1,000 to 500 to 50. Like it's coming down that, that curve. And so I think the way it looks in the future is, when someone comes with a claim, we're able to, create that molecule computationally, maybe get to 10, 15 candidates and then do testing on those.

Joshua And that's not so experimentally complex at that point then. it's quite manageable. But that, that's how-- that's the bet we're making.

Karl that's amazing. A couple of times, Joshua, you've talked about like friction, friction between,academia and commercialization, friction between this idea of how you use AI, and then there's friction when it comes to, funding and marketplace.

Karl And you guys have taken,an investment from Bold, which is L'Oreal's venture fund. how do you navigate the tension that comes from being a very fast-moving AI-based synthetic biology company and the rigid demands of one of the world's largest cosmetic companies?

Joshua [00:35:00] it's a great question, and it's quite frankly, the, the investment that Bold made into us and working with L'Oréal kind of really helped shape the company we are today.

Joshua Like, they really taught us how to work with big companies, and that's kind of invaluable, as a startup. But I would say we kind of look at it from two lens. At Debut we have our own internal pipeline, and our own internal pipeline is controlled by us. It is fast, it is quick, it is like governed by all of our team.

Joshua And so we look to release two new ingredients a year via that pipeline into the beauty market. However, the other side of it then is working with large corporates, including L'Oréal. We actually do a, a lot of work with them, and yes, these aren't like year-long projects. These are three-year projects, right?

Joshua Their innovation cycles are longer. However, the impact that we get to have with L'Oréal via going down this path is just like tremendous, right? They make hundreds of millions of products, and so it's just two sides of the company. it's one side is a slower, more integrated pipeline with [00:36:00] large companies, but the impact is very quick at the end and big and huge and great.

Joshua And then the other side is our own internal pipeline where we get to move quick and go after new claims and be more of that startup energy, and both have a role to play in this. Both kind of learn from each other, both feed from each other. But you're kind of right. if you do just go with 100% big company, the timelines will bankrupt the company, right?

Joshua You just can't do that. So, but also you can't just hedge it all on your internal pipeline as a young company. As you get older and you understand more and you become an expert in the industry, I think that's fine. But the amount of learning that we've had to do over the last few years with these large companies has just kind of shaped us to be really good at like discovering assets and ingredients and then commercializing them into beauty.

Joshua And without the help of those companies, we probably wouldn't have been able to do it as effectively.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible because like I- Th- that, that's a big tension that we hear from a lot of early stage companies trying [00:37:00] to, sell to these large companies and navigating the timelines and the expectations is very challenging and, clearly you've, you still see it, so it's not easy.

Erum it's still always gonna be challenging, but you're navigating it successfully, so congratulations on that.

Joshua Yeah, I g- and ag- and again, like people, why is beauty great? Well, the innovation timelines are probably the shortest across the big players that they will be compared to food, nutrition, and pharma, right?

Joshua So if you want to work with the large companies, it's, it is good, but you have to be willing to know that the innovation cycles are three to five years. And so y- what are you gonna do for those three to five years to make money? And, I think, five years ago it was, let's take these big upfront payments from companies and let's do technical workflows, right?

Joshua But how many of those have actually come to fruition? Probably a handful, right? and it's the problem that plagued the entire synbio industry, which was people would get all this huge revenue from these technology payments, and then two years later it was down to zero. And so it's kind of

[00:38:00] having the guts and having the foresight to say, "The technology payments are great, they support us, but a c- that's not a business model."

Joshua The business model has to be repeat reoccurring revenue that Wall Street can understand, where the company can be valued and its own destiny is in its own hands. And again, I think that's where the synbio industry heads and is heading. It's just, it's hard, right? It's hard to create your own pipeline

Erum Yeah.

Erum Yes. And it sounds like right now you're laser-focused on the biotech beauty, the beauty industry. we saw, on LinkedIn rumblings of like, working with some food companies or just talking to them. You mentioned that your AI platform, scans small molecules, which could possibly benefit pharma,and that your AI is internal.

Erum So a couple questions here. Have you thought about externalizing this AI for other people to use? And then what other industries, not that you're doing that today, but that you've explored or might have some side projects happening, side [00:39:00] hustles?

Joshua Yeah. So we-- No, that's, it's a great question.

Joshua So yeah, you're exactly right. The, platform that we've invested in effectively discovers new molecules and brings those molecules to an industry, right? And so yes, we started off in beauty, but the ones we have projects ongoing for can include pharma, more pharma-like molecules. you can imagine there's like pharma aspects of beauty, right?

Joshua Like that's a nice like- For sure ... that's a nice like jump into that, if you will. Yes ... and then, beauty from within, i.e. nutrition, is the same thing. It's small molecules, peptides that go there. And for us then, one of the most interesting ones right now is color, right? Marker

Joshua And the way we look at color is it's really good for our beauty business in terms of bioactive color and like high-performance color.

Joshua But of course, the, the volumes in the beauty color industry are very low. It's, if you look at the products. So we do work with companies. the one we're public about is Arterra, for a, a Red 40 replacement. And so you can imagine that there's multiple colors in the universe [00:40:00] and, we want them for beauty, but because the volumes aren't there, we work with players who wanna sell those colors to other industries, in nutrition, food and beverage, and pharma.

Joshua So I think, the way we approach it is the beauty is a really great market for us, right? We're nowhere near the level of saturation we had. Like, we are very busy right now, and we have to remain very focused. The margin profiles are good. We have a great reputation there. We are able to make consumer products and formulations.

Joshua But I think in the future, then that, that platform will expand into nutrition, beauty from within, and maybe pharma on the OTC side of beauty. But I think we're trying to stay in our lane. there's great synthetic biology tools for pharma, and that's a really saturated industry. But for the consumer side of it, no.

Joshua and so how do we kind of, how do we make our mark on the consumer angles is what we try and do.

Karl I mean, there's just so much opportunity and,you have regulatory changing all the time, which also creates a different kind of opportunities.

[00:41:00] So, for example, in the EU, they've got this deforestation regulation that's making it more challenging for people to use traditional ingredients.

Karl So how does Debut position its biomanufactured molecules as an immediate economic lifeline for brands that are, trying to comply with those laws?

Joshua Yeah. And this is like a thing that's happening right now. It's impacting beauty brands in 2028, and some of the examples we always give is retinol concentrations that happen to be lowered in the EU, which they happen to lower the concentrations, which leads it away from efficacious nature.

Joshua The same as skin brightening ingredients like kojic acid, they happen to lower the concentration there. And so, yeah, now people go, "Uh-oh, like a lot of my portfolio contains these molecules, so I have two and a half years to reformulate. How do I get the same efficacious nature when I can't use the molecules at the dose required?"

Joshua And so that allows us a really good opportunity, and there's-- our pipeline is trending towards that, which is, there's molecules [00:42:00] which will be off market in '28, and so it's allowing us to come through with biotech enabled molecules. and biotech for us isn't just the making of the molecule, it's the understanding of biology and how to use biological tools to create better molecules.

Joshua And once we find those molecules, then we biomanufacture the molecules, right? So I think it's that way, which is there's a lot of opportunity coming down where chemical ingredients can't do it. And so they have to go and discover some. And so how do you discover them? You work with us, and we help you discover then molecules for specific needs and bring them to market pretty quickly.

Joshua But yeah, it's kind of all trending in this direction of biotech. It's like safety standards, purity standards. It's every beauty brand in the world right now talks about longevity and the hallmarks of aging and like root causes of aging, and like chemistry just can't do that easy. And so it's just really good timing for synthetic biology and biotechnology in general, and beauty to [00:43:00] come together for regulatory pressures, for, regulatory pressures from the EU, regulatory pressures from like MAHA, Amer- like it's just-- it's a good time to be here.

Joshua Exactly. And yeah, that, that's why there's just such opportunity for, your listeners who are like, "I really wanna do something in syntheti- in bio- biotechnology." Beauty is a, a huge market. There are so many areas that we don't have time to go into, and it just, it needs more innovation.

Erum Yes.

Erum you touched on, you know, needing to understand biology to make, different molecules, but it's making biology for biology because we are made of biology, so it only makes sense.

Erum This is also, like, my thinking when it comes to space innovation. It's like, okay, you want to have life on Mars. How are you using biology to support biology? It's like, it's... I don't know. I feel like it's obvious, but, we now we're at a p- point where yes, it is obvious. Now how do we work to s- get the market to understand?

Erum Not to scale it up like you're saying, all the science, the technology, it's there. [00:44:00] Yeah, we could still learn more there, but it is the industries, the markets, economy, how are they gonna learn?

Joshua it's exactly right. The, the problem in biotechnology is no longer scaling a molecule or make a molecule with biology.

Joshua that is done. It is, what are we making and how does it fit into the economy to drive growth? How does it drive return? How does... And like these questions are somewhat harder to answer than how do I make that molecule, right? these are the harder questions which require multiple brains across multiple industries coming together.

Joshua It's not just biologists or chemists saying, "I can make it this way." Like, it's a very integrated task, which is seemingly harder.

Erum Yeah. and maybe it's multiple molecules to really solve a problem, and what does that look like?

Joshua It is, and synergistic relationships. Like, beauty always goes down this personalization path of like we haven't personalized it.

Joshua It's nothing in beauty is personalized right now because we are just starting to understand the differences between people's skin who live on this side of the world and this side of the world, right? And God, it's just like there's so much [00:45:00] great stuff gonna be done in the next 10 years by understanding the biology of skin and then, creating solutions for someone who's in China versus the US versus the EU and like that's kind of like the, that's where biology's gonna shine.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. And I just wanna say this because Carl and I were talking about it earlier. We were talking about sunscreen and, how there's SPF 30 and SPF 50, but the difference is very, like, minimal. And the point is, like, to reapply it. And what... So reapplying an SPF 30 is better than an SPF 50 that you don't reapply regularly.

Erum And then I'm like, "Well, what is the efficacy?" I mean, how much sun do we actually need? Yes, we need it for vitamin D, but, I kind of went down this rabbit hole, and it's people with different skin color require different amounts of sun.

Erum So lighter skin requires less, darker skin requires more. So maybe there's different types of s- sunscreens for different types of skin color. So it's like, which I know is sometimes controversial, but, like, it is, it's the truth. It's the biology

Joshua People's skin is different.

Joshua Yeah. [00:46:00] Yeah.

Erum Yeah. People's

Joshua biology different. Like, it's okay. Yeah.

Erum Okay. It's- Yeah. Yes. So the next question, I think I know the answer to it, but I'm just going to still ask it because I wanna hear you answer it again, 'cause it's a very important answer. And if you don't answer it the way I think, I will tell you the answer that I think you're gonna answer.

Joshua Okay. Okay. now I'm interested. Now I'm interested.

Erum Okay. Okay. So you advise other venture funds. Besides, Debut, you do... you've learned a lot, which is really great that you're giving back, and you advise on near frontier technology. So what's the single biggest red flag that tells you a brilliant scientific discovery will fail to scale in the real market?

Joshua I would say we've learned that it's cost and performance that wins. And so, w- I analyze so much technology that comes through the venture markets, and it's, "We want to make this molecule because we found that it does this." And the first question I always ask is, "How..." You know, "Is it better than what every other consumer company is using right now?"

Joshua And if the answer is no, it will not work. And if they go, "But it's more sustainable," [00:47:00] I will say, "It will not work." Like, what we always say at our company, because, a lot of our company joined Debut because of the sustainability aspects of biotechnology and that's great, but that's our responsibility.

Joshua It's our responsibility as a company to take sustainability into our processes. It is not the responsibility of the customer to do it, right? And so, yeah, that's the first thing. and it's always played out that exact way across all these venture funds where they go, "Here's a molecule or a technology, but it's gonna be, roughly the same, and it, and you're gonna have to invest $100 million to bring it to market."

Joshua Absolutely not. Red flag. Yeah.

Erum Yeah.

Joshua So-

Erum And it's gonna cost 10 times more.

Joshua Yeah. Yeah. And, even if it costs the same and it's roughly the same, why am I gonna go back through the whole formulation process and change it out? So, like, that is the biggest lesson that, that we learned very early on and we try and help others with, which is like, tell me why the brand manager of that brand, that billion-dollar brand cares.

Joshua 'Cause if it's, gives the consumer the same [00:48:00] thing and now I have to deploy all my resources, time, and energy for it, who cares? It's not gonna work.

Karl Yeah. And I think, you've kind of talked around this, but I think what something that a lot of people don't realize is like formulating with biology is different.

Karl Like, we have 100 and something years of experience formulating with chemistry. We don't have that much time formulating with biology, which is a very different beast. And so there's not enough people out there doing it. And as you mentioned, Joshua, you guys have these, super convergence of different disciplines coming together to formulate.

Karl And I think this idea of just, "Oh, we've got this great molecule that has great performance," doesn't take into account the fact that you still have to make it a formula that's gonna work.

Joshua That's exactly right. I mean, it's like the biggest crux and people still don't take it into consideration, right?

Joshua Which is you can make the best thing on the market, it can be the golden bullet, but if it can't go into a beautiful product that someone within two seconds puts on their skin and goes, "I love the way this feels," that immediate kind of gratification they get, if that doesn't [00:49:00] happen, they don't care what's in the formula.

Joshua And it's not the, th- just the end consumer, it's the brand in which you're pitching to. And so that is why our formulation team are so important to us because unless these ingredients can go into a range of textures and formats across SPF or body, hair, sun- like scalp, whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

Joshua it's just gonna be a molecule that stays on the shelf with good potential. A- and so, if I were to rewound a bit in the, in terms of Davey's life, I think we should have brought formulation in probably prior to the Series A, but, now it's a whole building. it's so, so important.

Joshua Amazing. Yeah.

Karl Yeah.

Erum just a quick follow-up. So you answered performance wins, that was the answer. Yeah. I thought you were gonna say the communications go to market,

Joshua No, no, no. That, that's,that, that's exactly... Look, that is, if not equally important because, like, I will tell you, we, we pitch 30, 40 brands a week and, I'll tell you things they do not understand, and rightfully so.

Joshua It's not their area. No one cares how the [00:50:00] ingredient is made. So just like, just think about that. All the effort that we put into biomanufacturing, no one cares, and that's fine. they care about, is it better for my consumer on a performance or a safety aspect? And does it give me a marketing hook that when I'm selling this to the consumer, they will pick my product?

Joshua That is it. And so if you can't articulate what the ingredient does, you don't have benchmark comparisons to current ingredients or you cannot, you know, have a good story around the ingredient, it will not go into marketing. And, we spend so much time and so much energy on every single word, and it's still like an evolving thing.

Joshua And I mean, I think it's really rare in this industry to find people who can speak science that clearly, that it doesn't matter who you are in the US, where you are, your education, your background, or what you care about, that they will understand it like that. Man, that is such a difficult problem to try and solve.

Joshua M- much harder than any of the biology.

Karl Yeah. and I'll do a plug for us at [00:51:00] Messaging Lab. I always say that- Okay. ... if that was an easy thing, we wouldn't have a business. But looking ahead 10 years, you've talked a little bit about this, Joshua, what role will vertically integrated biological factories play in everyday life?

Karl And what needs to happen to make bio-manufactured consumer goods the default rather than a luxury or still like a niche?

Joshua Yeah. I-- So the, I'll take the second question first because it's something we think about a lot. So w-with all new technology, it always starts off as a niche, right? And it's a really big barrier to entry to kind of drive it into, to mainstream.

Joshua So there's two things that went there. First, it's cost, right? So like as we go down to mass brands, so just think about like, when you go into your drugstores, you see all those products, and you ask why is there no biotechnology in there? It's because the cost game there is pretty severe, right?

Joshua and it's not like you, you can't, produce the ingredient at that cost. It just becomes then like [00:52:00] working capital considerations. It becomes like a lot of financial considerations there. So I th- I think first is just working capital cost, those kind of boring financial aspects of how you go into mass market.

Joshua but then scientific communication becomes a role. Like the people who are buying prestige luxury skincare for aging that's 15 times better than this or that, they know what they're buying, and they're educated, they are hunting for that. But if I'm gonna put this into, I don't know, like Nivea or CeraVe is, and put into,Costco, is that really our audience?

Joshua Is that really the audience? And it may be in the future, and I think it will, but at least my, my second point about what's needed, performance. Like the amount of biotech that's done to create the same exact molecules that we can find in cultivational chemistry right now is enormous, and we think it's just the wrong approach.

Joshua It's, biology is so beautiful and inherent and complex and it can do so many amazing things that's what we [00:53:00] should be targeting. We shouldn't be targeting doing the same things like chemistry or cultivation can. So it's performance and it's cost. In terms of like 10 years, I think the reason why vertically integrated matters so much is because of the harder problems we think, which is supply chain, formulation, consistency, speed to market.

Joshua you can't expect these companies who have no knowledge of biomanufacturing to, A, scale your process, B, use these molecules, 'cause like you said, formulation chemists are not trained typically on brand new things. Like we have to develop that. We have to develop the kind of the knowledge around how to formulate it.

Joshua And so that's where the vertical integration comes into it. It's not necessarily that we want to control everything or there's, a huge financial upside. There's financial upside, but it's, it's complex to control a vertically integrated company. But we think it's needed, 'cause otherwise things just stay at the pilot stage or stay at the the production stage, and you'll never [00:54:00] find it in your home.

Joshua So that's what we think is, be vertically integrated-- throughout beauty, nutrition. Pharma's already vertically integrated, right? So it's just the consumer side of it will become vertically integrated, and that will take a bit of time.

Erum I think a lot of it has to do with too, like, you- you're selling to these big companies and, in reality, a lot of these people might have been there for many years, and learning something new and taking it from an idea all the way to integrating into their supply chain and market requires so much thought that...

Erum And it's not their core competency. So to be able to show them the playbook of how to go to market, and all they have to do is say yes rather than think so hard about what this could look like, then they just sign. Okay, you just made it so easy for them.

Joshua And it's so, it's exactly why we have a consumer brand, right?

Joshua So we have a consumer brand called Dende. And every Thorne thought that the reason why we launched Dende was because we were trying to copy Amherst's business model, and it was gonna be great. the real reason why we

[00:55:00] have Dende is because we needed to show and demonstrate and learn how to talk about these ingredients and products in market to multiple customers.

Joshua Because when we go and pitch to these brands, the questions we always get were, how do I talk about inflammaging or skin tightening? How do I talk about biotechnology? Where in the pyramid of hierarchy of messaging does it land? What images do we use? How do I speak to biotechnology on TikTok versus Sephora, right?

Joshua So these were like questions that unless we solved and we could understand and speak as experts, we were never gonna get the sale. And like, just think about how crazy that is, that we have to be a biotechnology company on the ingredient discovery side, on the biomanufacturing side, on the commercial side, and then we also have amazing people on the marketing, brand building, product side that have to do all of that work just to demonstrate to the people at large companies, this is how you speak to it.

Joshua This is visually, these are the formulation formats, and we can go so in depth now that, on [00:56:00] TikTok, this is how we speak to biotechnology versus on Amazon And that's what's required to make successful sales, and how many biotechnology companies have that? very few, right?

Joshua but that's why we have the brand. It was, it's, yes, it generated a lot of money, but, it was more about how do we close that sales cycle with larger companies or mid-tier companies, and how do we remove their anxiety about using biology? And it was just our technique to do that.

Erum Yeah. That's amazing.

Erum Wow. What a great lesson for other companies. early-stage biotech beauty companies or even other industries to, that want to sell their ingredients to large industrial players. You have to kind of show them the end to end, what that looks like. And if you can build it and show them, that's amazing.

Erum If you can get the resources to do that, that's amazing. But even if you can just think through step by step everything you mentioned, all of the different, the types of messages and everything, that could help just for

[00:57:00] them to say yes or be on board because they understand what-- how to solve all the problems.

Joshua it's exactly right, and everyone thinks that once they say yes to the ingredient, that's the sale. And I mean, we physically make products right now, so we understand that's not even the first step. it's done with the formulation chemist, then with quality, regulatory. It's with, all the registrations, both with the facility, both, you know, like, yeah.

Joshua It just-- Un-unless you've done it, it's really hard to understand that just making the ingredient is the easiest part of this whole process.

Erum Yeah. Thanks for sharing all your experience. Now we're at the fun part of this- Oh, no. -interview where we have quick-fire questions.

Joshua Okay.

Erum Quick fire. Okay? So let's get a little loose and just answer very quickly.

Erum Okay. Okay. So if you could permanently delete one petroleum derivative from the global cosmetic supply chain tomorrow, what would it be?

Joshua Probably petrolatum. I think there's such a great opportunity for

[00:58:00] emollients and emulsifiers and to be replaced with biological ones, not just to replace it with the same one, but to replace them with ones which are high-performing, may have clinical activity, and just kind of give the product a another edge while doing the job of like an emulsifier surfactant.

Joshua I think that's where we'll see next.

Karl I love it. What's one traditional ingredient harvest method that belongs in the history books?

Joshua I would say everyone keeps forgetting the lessons of Taxol. Taxol was the one thing I was taught when I went through, my master's and PhD, which is Taxol is an oncology drug that used to be harvested from the yew tree, and then it was, like, semi-harvested from the yew tree.

Joshua Then they did plant cell culture, then they did chemistry, and then it ended up at fermentation, right? And so, like that progression of technology from like cultivation to chemistry to biomanufacturing of a complex molecule will always happen, yet people start to go backwards down the chain to plant cell culture to harvesting.

Joshua Right. [00:59:00] And like, I always like to remember that from the history books is there are so many examples like that, like paracetamol from the tree as well. If I had a- another example, look to history 'cause it will tell you eventually how technology kind of goes down.

Erum Oh, wow. That's great. I love that lesson, the case study.

Erum So if Dave Buys' AI discovery platform had a human personality trait, what would it be? I

Joshua think relentlessly curious but allergic to intuition. And I think like the way- I, I think the, the, the reason why I say that is it's always so easy to try and put human impact into these processes, but the reason why we don't do it with human impact is 'cause we want to explore vast amounts of chemical space to explore new ingredients.

Joshua And so, yeah, that's what I think would-- it would be.

Karl I love that, allergic to intuition, because the A- No AI-- I mean, it's-- I, I think of AI as triggering our own intuition if we trust our own intuition, but there is no intuition [01:00:00] in these large language models.

Joshua Yeah. it's a tool to find the best outcome and just kind of let the tool be the tool.

Karl Okay, what's one beauty industry marketing buzzword that makes you roll your eyes as a scientist?

Joshua Now I've been in this long, it's clinically proven. you know, we do clinically proven- ... but the amount of differentiation you can see a clause clinically proven goes all the way from we tested it on 30 people in the office who said it was really nice and they loved it, so we had 100% score, all the way through to like, people always ask me what's the best products to buy as a beauty consumer, and I will always, I will either say ours or L'Oréal's.

Joshua And because the level of rigorous clinical testing those products go through, it is the benchmark of like wh- what a great product should do. And so like there's everything in between, and I think with changes in regulation and what we discussed today, it will become a bit more narrow hopefully, because like clinical testing should mean something, and at the [01:01:00] moment it doesn't.

Joshua It's just such a wide gamut of things.

Erum Oh, wow. So interesting. Good one. Okay, final question. Finish this sentence: The future of premium skincare will be programmed by...

Joshua Data, not folklore.

Erum Oh.

Joshua love it. Okay. Yes. I was- Yes ... I was ch- channeling my like Taylor Swift era there

Joshua for folklore, but, but like it's okay.

Erum Yeah.

Joshua Yeah, data.

Erum Yeah. Data, not folklore. That's great.

Joshua Thank you guys. This has been super great.

Karl Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the Grow Everything podcast. We really have enjoyed this conversation and look forward to speaking to you again at some point in the future.

Joshua Yeah, thank you so much. great conversation, and it's such an important industry and movement that I'm glad you guys champion it. And, uh, thank you for having me on the show.

Karl Iram, what did you think of that interview?

Erum I love that we finally had Joshua on. Wow. This, so much insight because, he is cranking away. He has been and has brought so many insights to us just in this episode. I love when he was talking about how making the ingredient is the easiest part, which we start talking about that too, because we know so many innovators that have made breakthrough products, but they are having trouble really scaling up and getting partners and [01:03:00] get- getting to that next step in the business aspect of their company.

Erum So the real work is the communication and the brand education, really on the scientific side Joshua was talking about pitching 30 to 40 brands a week, and most of these brands don't understand biotech, so he really has to figure out how to communicate it, right? They had their consumer product called Dende, and, he really had to learn how to talk about it in a way that brand managers or brand owners were able to understand and run with it.

Erum And this is really what we're trying to do with the podcast, is start talking about biology in a way that can be understood by more people. it's hard because, what we say, in our day-to-day work at Messaging Lab is that if everyone's your audience, no one's your audience, right? You really need to have a targeted, conversation every time you are in a room with specific people.

Erum So yeah, sure, if you're doing a TED Talk, you can be [01:04:00] very generic. Obviously with a podcast, we do tend to be a bit more broad. But the way Joshua was talking about how to talk to brands in order for them to understand the full concept, and not just the science, but the business aspect, the whole playbook, so all they have to do really is just say, "Yeah, you understand us, you understand the problem, you know what to do end to end, so we don't have that many questions, and let's...

Erum Where do I sign?" You

Karl know? Yeah. And I mean, I think, one great thing is that Joshua reminded us, and I think we do this with our listeners too, is that nature is very smart. It's smarter than synthetic chemists. biologists at MIT and UC Irvine were creating complex natural molecules really in five days, versus years, using biology versus using synthetic chemistry, and that was the realization that led Joshua to found Debut.

Karl Biology [01:05:00] is able to do things that are very complex that chemistry just can't do. So as we move forward and we have more products created with biotech, I think we're gonna see a lot more complexity in the products, but that also means more functionality and more performance.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Erum That's the song we sing. Functionality, performance, sustainability will come with biotech. the big thing too he mentioned is the vertical integration is a real moat. And that's something Debut is doing really well. He's talking about how engineering biology is now commoditized, anyone can do it. I think that's, a lot easier said than done.

Erum I mean, feel like some people still find some challenges, but the way that Debut is doing it, they have a lot of, capability to engineer biology. So what, Joshua's seeing and people that are a bit more advanced in this space, they see that the competition barriers are setting up that supply chain.

Erum earlier in the [01:06:00] conversation and in the intro, you mentioned formulation being the challenge, 'cause biology isn't the same as chemistry, so you have to formulate these products in a whole new way, and what does that look like? What does that feel like? What does that smell like, right? and then of course, that last mile that is the most important is the consumer communication.

Erum Do the consumers understand the value and then experience it, right? I got my hair done. I went to the salon, and I was talking to the stylist, and they're talking about how many products that they get pitched. And a lot of times they say yes because they like the people that are selling it, but then when it comes down to using it, their customers are like, "Oh, I don't like this.

Erum It's a bit too greasy," or, "It's a bit too oily," or, "It's not this, it's not that," and the product e- then ends up failing. So the communication's so important, and being able to do that full stack, this vertical integration. And Debut talked about these other companies that they look to, like DSM, like Cargill, like ADM,

Erum that has looked [01:07:00] end to end at what needs to be done, and they're doing it. So, I mean, it's amazing to hear, and we were so fortunate to have this conversation.

Karl Yeah, and I think one of the things that is worth mentioning, because we do talk about it a fair amount across episodes, is how AI plays into this.

Karl And Joshua talked about how it narrows the funnel it means that can, AI can make things faster theoretically on a screen, but you still need wet labs, and you need to be able to use a wet lab, to screen molecules and to reduce those candidates that AI produces from, billions, down to thousands, down to a few that you're actually gonna test.

Karl And he mentioned that the direction is really to take 10 to 15 computational candidates that are then tested. So yes, AI moves things faster, but you still have to do that validation in the real world.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. I actually just recently, I watched a clip where it was a conversation between Zach [01:08:00] Galifianakis and Conan O'Brien. I guess it's Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, that podcast.

Erum Yes. And so Zach Galifianakis talking about AI and how he's terrified of it, but he also was saying, but it's-- he's really excited for its use to use in medicine and biology. So it's something we should talk about more is like, you know- I think

Karl we should, yeah ...

Erum you know- Yeah ... where are the biggest opportunities and where we need to focus our attention rather than building all this AI slop tools that, is not helpful at all.

Erum anyway, that's a side story. And then I would just say it's the topic that really sparked this whole bio dye series, and mentioned it up top, is the regulatory tailwinds opening this window.

Erum And Joshua pointed to s- two specific things. one is that EU has these deforestation rules, so you just can't be extracting different, plants from the forest. and they also have ingredient concentration limits [01:09:00] on certain ingredients like retinol or kojic acid, which, by 2028 has to have limited concentrations.

Erum So I think that's creating this urgent demand for biotech replacements, which,this is something that Joshua hi- hit on, we do t- talk about throughout the series. And here in the United States, we have this MAHA pressure, but we have other pressures throu- through from parents, from consumers, a lot coming online.

Erum You shared, a clip with me on, I don't know, Instagram, and it was just pointing towards bio dyes and all these different ingredients just being available in the US still willy-nilly, where the EU has limited 5,000 chemicals. They've taken it out of their supply chains, and we just have like, I don't know, maybe six at this point.

Erum I remember when I first started looking at this many years ago, there was only, like, four, chemicals that were limited. And also the fact that, there were these MAHA pressures, but [01:10:00] there's no, consequences. So one of the things is there are these, claims that were staked by the, by the United States to remove these,toxic synthetic dyes.

Erum They called out about six or seven of them, and they said, You have to remove it. It's voluntary to remove it. It-- But if you don't, and there's no consequence."

Erum so I think it's, still really important to collectively, whether through our governments, through our advocacy, to be able to talk about needing healthier, safer ingredients. And biotech can afford that

Karl Yeah. And I mean, a lot of these ingredients start off as luxury ingredients, and that's probably no surprise.

Karl many of these ingredients are expensive to produce, they're new, and people who can afford them are willing to pay for the performance. but over time, we know that everything gets cheaper, the ingredients end up becoming more widespread, and they end up getting more used. if there was [01:11:00] consequences with regards to the colors, then we would see them dropped.

Karl and I think we do see the industry scrambling to try to replace them in time. But as you said, there's no consequence associated with it. There's no fine. So voluntary, but we wanna see more people, more companies, adopt these ingredients and do it in a way that's timely

Erum Exactly.

Erum Exactly. I'm excited that we were able to speak with Joshua. What great insights we received. I mean, there's so much to continue talking about. I cannot wait to see what Debut is up to next, so stay tuned for more conversation.

Erum Our next episode, we're going to be speaking with Olivier Roland of L'Oréal. So now we're getting into some biotech beauty, which again, we love that category, so stay tuned for that. Couple things is that we've been really busy on social media, so you might be seeing our clips, you might be seeing our posts.

Erum Please engage, like. We are listening. We are wanting to help provide these insights, share more details. Let's talk [01:12:00] beyond just here on the podcast. please like and subscribe. And one big thing is that we will be at World Biomarkets, which is called BioInnovations, in Omaha this September. Carl and I will be moderating a couple sessions.

Erum Excited to talk about commercializing a lot of these technologies that we talk about, all of these ingredients that we talk about here on the podcast. If you wanna join us, the promo code is GrowEverything for 25% off to attend.

Karl Thank you so much for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us.

Karl All the information is in the show notes. And don't forget to subscribe to our Substack. Let's grow.

Erum Let's grow.