Emerging Skin Microbiome Science, featuring Holobiont Medical Research Foundation Co-Founders Julia Durack and Larry Weiss
Welcome to Cosmo Factory, a podcast by Cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna, where we explore the entire cosmetics, personal care, and fragrance industry supply chain. I'm your host, Deanna Utrusky, and here at Cosmo Factory, we look beyond the trends to discover the ideas, initiatives, and innovations that are truly advancing beauty. Let's get started. This episode is about emerging science. It's about both the engrafted and environmental microbiome.
Deanna:It's about skin health research that includes indigenous communities. And it's about continual inquiry and the movable boundaries of knowledge. Today on the Cosmo Factory podcast, I'm speaking with Larry Weiss and Julia Durek, co founders of HoloBio Medical Research Foundation. Larry, Julia, welcome to Cosmo Factory.
Larry:Thank you very much for inviting us. It's a pleasure to be here.
Julia:Yeah, thanks. Excited to be here and looking forward to this conversation.
Deanna:Likewise. No, thank you both. So in July, the two of you, along with a larger team of scientists, doctors and researchers, published an article in the peer reviewed scientific journal called Nature Communications. This article documents skin biome research involving indigenous populations living in the Amazon. And I'll quote from the article abstract here to summarize the results.
Deanna:You write, These findings reveal that diverse environmentally enriched microbiota may confer skin benefits that are overlooked in our current models of healthy skin. So this phrase environmentally enriched microbiota stands out to me. Most of us live in what's called the built environment. Our lives happen in buildings and vehicles, cities, towns, and any contact that we have with nature, with trees, waterways, dirt, our interactions with nature, they tend to be occasional. We take a walk or go on a weekend trip or a holiday, and it's often highly curated.
Deanna:We interact with nature, but it's often a version of nature that has been landscaped or contrived, I might say. My first question for you is what microbes and what skin health benefits are people getting when they live in an unadulterated natural environment?
Larry:Julia, would you like to take that?
Julia:What we learned from studying pre industrialised skin microbiome of the Yanomami is that in fact our microbiomes are constantly what should be replenished by the environment. And as you mentioned in our modern lifestyle, we spend about 90% of our times indoors. So in fact, our microbiome is replenished by indoor microbes, but it's not the case with indigenous communities that live a traditional lifestyle. What we've learned is that these essentially microbial blanket provided a shield from the environment from environmental stresses like oxidative stress and provided constant metabolic support that our modern skin and its microbiome is now lacking, Our skin and the microbiome are vulnerable and highly stressed out compared to these highly enriched microbial communities of the Yanomami.
Larry:Let me add, one of the things that anthropologists have been noticing for many years is that within these communities that still live a traditional foraging lifestyle, they don't have any of the skin problems that we do. So it was specifically noted quite a while ago that the adolescents don't have acne. Acne is essentially unknown. So acne, eczema, rosacea, psoriasis, all these inflammatory conditions were not part of the native human condition of foragers at all. And the other thing that Julie just mentioned is these populations, the Yanomami have, I believe it's still the most diverse microbiome that's ever been recorded in a human population.
Larry:Well, they live in one of the most diverse microbial environments that's still left on the planet. And as you pointed out, we spend 90% of our time indoors.
Deanna:Yeah.
Larry:And so it's not very surprising, but the piece that was lost. So the engrafted part of the microbiome that starts at birth and that, you know, is fully populated sometime early in childhood. And that, that piece has, it does a lot of things, but has two very big jobs. The first one is colonization resistance. Basically just keep the ecosystem so fully populated, with species that are so well adapted, that an outsider has little chance of gaining a foothold.
Larry:And the other piece is several members of that ecosystem communicate directly with our immune system, and they're able to call out an immune response in case there is a breach and then recall it when the breach is cured. The piece that they have, this healthy environmental biofilm sits on top of that. And it's constantly replenished and harmonized with the environment of true live. And we didn't just interrogate it axonomically. That is who is there.
Larry:What we did is we interrogated it functionally and found there was two big clusters. And Julia already mentioned the first one is oxidative stress. We live in an oxygen environment and we're bathed in ultraviolet. Bacteria solved this problem 2,700,000,000 years ago, and they didn't solve it by the way, by making the sense. Screen.
Larry:And the second big cluster of genes that we're missing are all these secondary metabolic pathways that, you know, as Julie mentioned, these provide metabolic support. And because we don't have that layer and every plant and every animal and every surface in the environment is a biofilm, but we don't have it because of where we live. And also because many of our hygiene practices, even if we did have it, we would constantly do. In, in missing that what's happening is we're exposed to much more oxidative stress. So we're essentially oxidizing.
Larry:We're rusting. Some of us rust faster than others, and we're starving because we don't have that metabolic support. That reduces our resilience and in response to stress in the absence of that resilience, we don't bend, we break, and that shows up as inflammation.
Deanna:Very helpful. I'd like to talk about another phrase, in the article quote that I read a moment ago. The phrase I'm thinking of is current models of healthy skin. Does this imply that our collective baseline understanding of healthy skin, what we are trying to achieve or maintain maybe with skincare, is that baseline actually not healthy? Should we be thinking differently about what healthy skin is?
Julia:What we think of healthy skin is, particularly in adults, is skin that is in low diversity, highly dominated by lipophilic cutibacterium species and that indicates you have healthy skin. Anything else means you've got dry skin for example, if your diversity is slightly higher, we see wrinkles, we see drier skin. But what these studies are missing and what we're missing in our understanding of healthy skin today is that diversity, is that lack of environmental microbes that we no longer have on our skin.
Deanna:Yeah. So just to make sure I understand correctly, the common understanding that our industry has perhaps of healthy skin is very much premised on what you described, Larry, the engrafted microbiome, the microbes that are somehow programmed into our being. They live with us. They repopulate almost no matter how much soap we use or where we go in the world. And what you're advocating for now perhaps is a new understanding of healthy skin that relies on microbes that can only be borrowed from the natural environment.
Deanna:Does that sound like I have it right?
Larry:It's the root of it. Look, the first thing is, and to use the line from Princess Bride, I don't think that word means what you think that it does. So when you use the word healthy, our common, you know, modern industrialized view of healthy is not being sick, at least that we're aware of. So perhaps the right word for that would be non sick. Okay.
Larry:Healthy from an environment, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, is the resilience in response to stress. They bend and we break. And so, what we've lost is our resilience. And so the way we're thinking about this is when the ecosystem was fully biologically intact, and that is essentially harmonized with the environment in which we lived, and also represents very similar to, look, our species have been around for, call it half a million years, for, you know, everything until like the last twenty or so thousand years, this was the state of the human condition. And most of these diseases that we have right now just didn't exist anywhere.
Larry:So when you use the word what is healthy skin, we can talk about what is normal skin, that's a statistical abstraction. We can talk about what skin looks like when it's non sick. Okay? And that's that is actually more appropriate to the way that we think about it. But we have to acknowledge that a biologically intact human skin and skin microbiome looked very different, both taxonomically and functionally, from the way we look today.
Larry:So what we've built is, this is a, it's just one evolutionary reference point about what it looked like when these diseases were not commonly found or may be found at all. And that gives us a perspective that we can look at what we look like today and use that as an assessment. When we look at what everyone within our community, within the industrialized population looks like, we don't have that perspective. We can't really see. You know, I think the words healthy and non sick often get confused.
Deanna:Thank you for that. So the next question I want to ask is how now in the cosmetic and personal care industry, maybe ingredient makers and product formulators in particular, how can we make good use of this understanding of skin health as you've described?
Larry:Well, to start doing actual real world validation of things. In other words, we do a lot of marketing science. We're not doing an adequate amount of actual what is happening out there in the communities with these things. How is it working? How is it delivering on a promise?
Larry:That is the first piece. The second piece, and I think that this is also really important, is acknowledge that our knowledge is finite and our ignorance is infinite. And the biggest myth of the microbiome is that we know anything about it yet. It's still very early. And look, science is a disciplined practice of wonder.
Larry:It's driven by creativity and our desire to make things better, but it needs to be tempered by a deep sense of humility that acknowledges that there's a great deal that's own. Look, we only decided that we had a microbiome twenty years ago, and now we're behaving like we know everything about it. And so this is for us as scientists, this is an incredibly exciting time. It's stepping on a new planet that we've never seen before, and the complexity is amazing, but we need to acknowledge that. And that the way that we approach skincare today, is very much a traditional approach where we fix broken things.
Larry:You come in, you have got this thing that is broken, We have poked around inside the mechanism of a disease or a problem that we do not really understand, and found a way to introduce a novel, maybe patentable foreign substance to ameliorate the symptoms of this disease we do not understand. But along the way, often break more stuff. Those are the adverse side effects from things. What I'm suggesting is a very different approach where can we restore what was lost? And if we do that, do we regain the resilience so that these failure modes, these adverse events, these diseases don't occur at all.
Larry:And I would advocate for everyone who is concerned about these things to recognize that we're moving from a very linear approach to a systems biology approach, and it's going to be complicated.
Deanna:Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you for that. I noticed with my questions today, I seem to be very focused on quoted material, but I do wanna share another quote that I think many people would hope is a sort of guideline for our modern moment. And and this quote is, when you know better, you do better, which is something Maya Angelou said. With this idea in mind, I want to ask you about environmental sustainability as well as about medical ethics and racial justice.
Deanna:I want to ask you, is your research disrupting and exploiting healthy ecosystems, ecosystems, that of the Amazon or that of the Yanomami people?
Larry:That's a really important question. And so the answer to it is anytime you measure something, you do change it. And we've been very cognizant of this and the, our collaboration and that's what it is with this population is very, the first time it's been done this way because our unique relationship with it, but they are collaborators. So this is not, you know, we are going there and sort of mining them for things for us. This is how do we craft a mutually beneficial relationship.
Larry:Now, what I will tell you is that it is not simple. And these populations are critically endangered because of all sorts of things, climate change, political stuff. Is very complicated, but it's very important to us, not just as a company, but us as an industrialized population that they survive. So everything was done with that in mind. Sustainability is really complicated because there are no perfect answers.
Larry:But what we have tried to do, this falls very much, you know, I have to give kudos to David Goode and the Yanomami Foundation, because without them, this would absolutely not have been possible. We, people like us, do not go into those communities.
Julia:Only way this study was possible was because of our collaboration with the Yanomami Foundation. They are the custodians of preserving and respecting kind of traditional lifestyle. David himself is part Yanomami, and he's the only one that kind of interacts with the Yanomami communities from this study's perspective. Now, the Yanomami Foundation are very focused on respecting traditional life lifestyle and preserving the lifestyle. So, you know, and we're just grateful for the opportunity to kind of study the community and have our hands on the samples.
Julia:It was really an amazing opportunity because we learned a lot.
Deanna:Can I just ask as a follow-up, do you have any sense of sort of the recognition or understanding that the people involved in this study have of our skin concerns or industrial interests? Or like, do they have a picture of, you know, the the industrialized world?
Larry:I hope not. In many ways, the best thing that we could do for these populations would be to leave them alone. Because, you know, anytime we interact with them. But, you know, this is his family, and the collaboration here was, look, they are critically endangered in this world, and they, it is in all of our best interests that they survive. There's maybe 30,000 of these humans left alive.
Larry:One of the things we didn't talk about is, despite the fact that they don't have any inflammatory disease, several of their inflammatory biomarkers are elevated. We would, based on that, call them inflamed, but they're not inflamed. And what this is telling us, we don't actually know what a healthy human looks like because none of us ever met one. So it's critically important that they survive undisturbed. And so, you know, everything is done with, you know, I'm gonna date myself, used to watch Star Trek, but something along the lines of this prime directive, which is try not to interfere.
Larry:Because look, when these humans are gone, they will leave no record. So if we need to understand what's happened to our health and we need a full perspective on these, there is a clock ticking on it. And so everything that we have done is how do we do best? And by the way, we welcome the inquiry around it. And if someone has ideas about how to do it better or how to do what we did in another population, those conversations absolutely should happen and we encourage that.
Larry:David is preparing a manuscript on the ethical collaboration with indigenous populations for publications right now. It's very important to us, to all of us.
Julia:Well, and will add here that the Yanomami community that we are working with through the Yanomami Foundation are interested in kind of understanding what we uncover. What does it mean? So there is an educational component to this where we try to kind of put it in simple terms and kind of explain what we're learning and what it means. So it's an ongoing kind of back and forth. We're learning a lot from them, but we would like to give back and kind of grow that understanding.
Deanna:Well, while we're thinking about learning, I want to jump back to the world we all work in, the three of us, I should say, and certainly our listeners. We do have a lot more to learn about skin microbiome science, a lot more research to do. I'm wondering what the next hypotheses worth exploring are. Maybe this is what's your team up to or would you make some suggestions for other research teams out there? What should we be studying?
Deanna:What are our next questions to try to answer or learn more about?
Julia:Well, I'm just going to say, I think what I'd love to see is just more diversity in the people that we study ethically and ethnicity and also obviously lifestyles. But just because that's the only way we will learn more about the micro, what encompasses a microbiome, skin microbiome.
Larry:Yeah, and this is going be dependent on a couple of things. One is our methods are better than they've ever been, but worse than they'll ever be. We need, you know, there's still, look, we're now at the stage where we can, we have a good chance of getting reproducible data, but whether it is actually bias free or accurate, it is not. So we have got some precision, but we do have accuracy. In fact, we are precisely inaccurate these days.
Larry:So our methods need to improve, number one. Number two, our commitment to the integrity, the clinical integrity, in other words, to really understand if these things are going to work, we need to study larger populations. We need to go past marketing science and go into the real world evidence. Don't if I sent it to you, there was a Rock Health article that came out about two weeks ago. Basically, look, as you know, women make 80% of the buying decisions and they consider themselves to be the chief medical officers in their families.
Larry:And they just want to make good decisions. And they believe less than 5% of the health related information that they get online. So we need to do better. We all deserve better with that. And the way we will do that, the way we will rebuild that credibility is again by a real commitment to not quick easy answers that you can use to just to sell the product, but a recognized commitment that this, the science of the microbiome is complicated, it's going to take time, but it holds the promise that we can, if we can restore the resilience instead of treating all these problems, we'll just have less of them, which is pretty much what everybody wants.
Larry:But it's going to take some time to get there.
Deanna:Excellent. Just quickly for our listeners that I do want to mention a few past Cosmo Factory episodes on microbiome topics in particular that that you might want to listen back to. This year at Cosmo Professor Worldwide Bologna, I sat down with Ida Makala of UTA Scientific. That episode is number 55. In episode 27, you'll find my interview about phage technology for skincare with Milan Bunata of Fagopharma.
Deanna:And even farther back in the Cosmo Factory archive, you'll find my conversation with Marie Drago, founder of Galenae Microbiome Skincare, a brand that is owned by Sashedo. That's episode number seven. And now, Larry and Julia, you've added quite a lot of good information to this very exciting topic. I thank you for sharing your research with us today and for being guests on the Cosmo Factory podcast.
Larry:Thank you so much for inviting us.
Julia:Thank you.
Deanna:Thank you so much for listening. If you find the Cosmo Factory podcast useful, please take a moment to leave us a five star review and share your thoughts so even more cosmetic industry professionals can discover the Cosmo Factory. I'm Deanna Utrusky. Please join me again next Tuesday for a new episode of the Cosmo Factory podcast.
