Today, Joshua Britton is the company’s founder and CEO Debut, a biotechnology company delivering “highly effective” bioactive cosmetic ingredients “at unprecedented speeds.” But before the startup began innovating in the biotech space, it was just an concept that got here from “academic research,” “a happy Uber ride” and “a vision for the beauty industry,” Britton says.
Photo credit: Billy Economou, BE Studios. Joshua Britton.
Britton received his Ph.D. obtained a PhD in biochemistry and organic chemistry, and then continued his studies at the University of California, Irvine. He then decided to apply his knowledge to “a new thing called cell-free and synthetic biology,” which refers to the processes in biotechnology that enable the creation or modification of biological organisms. Essentially, enzymes or microbes may be “taught” to produce powerful ingredients – including plant or flower molecules – in a reactor under laboratory conditions.
Naturally, this process has huge implications for the multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry, which relies on natural ingredients for fragrance and other properties. Britton decided it was time to enter the biotechnology mainstream. But after all he also had to finance the enterprise. Working in the back of a professor’s lab during the day, he had to commute to Uber at night to earn extra money. When he talked to one of the passengers and pitched his idea to her, she was sold and wrote him a check for $100,000 to support his efforts.
Britton’s passenger could be Debut’s first investor, but definitely not the last: the company has raised funds $22.6 million series Round led by Material Impact in 2021 and $40 million in Series B round led by BOLD, L’Oréal’s enterprise capital fund, the world’s largest cosmetics companylast 12 months.
“Whenever people want [fragrance] products, they must use agriculture effectively to get them.”
Debut has already brought the technology to market under a consumer skincare brand called Thenwhose goal is the inflammatory process related to the aging of the human body. The products contain naringenin, a powerful polyphenol typically found in grapefruit peel that is clinically proven to strengthen the skin barrier and reduce inflammation. According to Britton, clinical claims allow for “product differentiation in the market” and many brands are entering the market trying to move into other mainstays comparable to vitamin C, niacinamide and squalane.
But fragrances might be the next area for Debut, which coincides with growing consumer demand for transparency and natural ingredients, and concerns about influence of the cosmetics industry to dwindling natural resources. Most perfume house fragrance ingredients come from crops, perhaps from “a lavender field in France” or from the roots of a particular species of tree, Britton says, which requires the use of land, water and agrochemicals.
“Whenever people want these products, they have to use agriculture efficiently to get them,” Britton explains. “The perfume industry is superb at hiding the incontrovertible fact that most fragrances are actually chemical in nature. If you dig deeper into them, you will discover that they are made through petroleum-based synthesis. And that is what we wish, you wish change.”
“There may be 200 or 300 compounds there at different levels. And you have to be able to mimic that exactly in a bioreactor.”
When it comes to fragrances, Debut is all about “mimicking nature.” Sometimes that means mirroring a single ingredient, a process similar to wine or beer production, where an aqueous, sweet solution is mixed with a cell, but instead of producing wine or beer, a model of the scent is created, explains Britton. It’s a method that requires limited land use, no agrochemicals and “little or no waste.”
Of course, some fragrances “are very complex blends” that require careful balancing of various notes – and Debut has developed technology to recreate them, says Britton. “The nose is so sensitive that if you smell a root, for example, you will see that there may be 200 or 300 chemicals in it at different levels,” he explains. “And you have to be able to mimic that exactly in a bioreactor. if so [don’t]then you will not have the same scent and the product will not be successful.
The debut is about putting successful products into the hands of consumers – abandoning the standard horizontal integration model used in biotechnology, in which companies look for a scientific solution that is then produced on a very small scale for a vertical scale that from the beginning puts the emphasis on the end consumer and the product, according to Britton.
“When we think about how to make synthetic biology accessible to people, we think about it in the form of tangible products,” Britton says. “This means that we must not only conduct groundbreaking research, but also engage with our consumers and users. We need to understand how to create recipes. We need to make physical products.”