Nearly half of society has some sort of skin sensitivity. Cybele Microbiome is the company behind a new direct-to-consumer skincare brand. Cybele’s unique products trigger the natural skin biome to secrete skin restoration compounds. Today I sat down with Cybele’s CEO and Founder, Nicole Scott PhD. Nicole is a geneticist who became fascinated with the interaction of skincare products and the skin biome. Cybele was born when Nicole discovered how to gain precision control of microbes through the use of functionalized prebiotics. She thinks of cosmetic ingredients as first and foremost “food for the microbiome.”
Q. During IndieBio, you ran a small pilot study with your skin serum formulation and got some exciting early results. Tell us about what was seen?
Just two weeks into the study, I got a bunch of excited phone calls, because many of our volunteers were noticing the results right away. We provided the photos to a dermatologist who is highly experienced in reading skin conditions on photos, and he confirmed there’s notable decreases in scaliness, flakiness, hyperpigmentation, papular eczema, eczema, psoriasis, and even a decrease in a precancerous lesion. We knew that one of our long-chain ceramides is a known anti-melanoma compound– but these early results after just 2 weeks have us floored.
Q. Your prebiotic ingredients trigger the skin biome to create only long chain ceramides and no short chain ceramides. Why is that so important?
There are huge differences in the bioactive function of short chain and long chain ceramides. The long chains are the good ones. The short chains actually harm your skin, competing with, and fighting against, the good ceramides. Your typical skin care products that advertise ceramides don’t make this distinction, and can be doing as much bad as good.
Q. As a direct-to-consumer company, how does your hero product evolve over time into additional products and SKUs?
From skin serum we can round out that product line with moisturizers, toners, and eye creams.
But we aren’t a one trick pony. What is also really exciting is that we can get your skin biome to make hyaluronic acid — the most common ingredient in anti-aging cosmetics. These advances come from our platform to identify and formulate new prebiotics for other uses. This allows us to create a suite of related and complementary products. We also will customer’s skin biome assessments and input to help craft the additional products.
Q. How do you manufacture the prebiotic ingredients, and how does this affect Cybele’s margins in the early years of the company?
Our prebiotics are the output of fermentation. At small scale, we can purchase our prebiotics. They are not expensive. As we scale up, we can use any standard contract manufacturing organization to produce them for us — so no capex needs to go into ingredient manufacturing.
Ceramides are normally expensive to add to skincare products — and every bit added to a formulation hurts margins. In our case, not only is our product more effective, but we aren’t paying for ceramides. The skin biome makes them. So we have a much higher margin — estimated at 88% for our serum product.
Q. Tell us about your team.
Our team includes James Lamoureux — a microbiologist that received his PhD with Dr. David Low at UC Santa Barbara — and Hui-Ling Seow, who helped develop and carry out the marketing strategy for a HR platform Epic Quest Games, and Liz De Ruyter, who lead the Amazon On-Campus Store, launching products like PuraVida, Red Bull and Aveeno at UC San Diego. We are currently expanding the team by actively recruiting a Chief Marketing Officer right now.
