Today, Joshua Britton is the founder and CEO of Debut, a biotechnology company that delivers “high-performance” cosmetic bioactive ingredients “at unprecedented speed.” But before the startup began innovating in the biotech sector, it was just an idea, born from “some academic research,” “a lucky run with Uber,” and a “vision for the beauty industry,” Britton says.
Image credit: Courtesy of Debut. Joshua Britton.
Britton completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry and organic chemistry before continuing his studies at the University of California, Irvine. Next, she decided to apply what she had learned to “this new thing called synthetic and cell-free biology,” which refers to the processes within biotechnology that allow the creation or modification of biological organisms. In essence, enzymes or microbes can be “taught” how to produce potent ingredients – including plant or flower molecules – in a reactor in a laboratory setting.
Of course, the process has huge implications for the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, which relies on natural ingredients for fragrance and other properties. Britton decided it was time to bring biotechnology into the mainstream. But, of course, he also needed to finance the venture. While he worked in the back of his professor’s lab during the day, he drove for Uber at night to earn some extra money. When she started talking to a passenger and presented her idea to her, she was convinced and wrote him a check for $100,000 to support her efforts.
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Britton Passenger would be Debut’s first investor, but certainly not the last: The company raised $22.6 million in a Series A round led by Material Impact in 2021 and $40 million in a Series A round B led by BOLD, the venture capital fund of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company, last year.
“When people want [fragrance] products, they must use agriculture effectively to obtain them.”
Debut has already brought the technology to market with a skincare brand called Deinde, which targets inflammation, a process associated with the aging human body. The products contain naringenin, a powerful polyphenol typically found in grapefruit peel and which has been clinically proven to strengthen the skin barrier and reduce inflammation. According to Britton, clinical claims enable “product differentiation in the marketplace,” and many brands are coming to debut as they look to convert from other mainstays like vitamin C, niacinamide and squalane.
But fragrances will be Debut’s next frontier, a move that coincides with growing consumer demand for transparency and natural ingredients and concerns about the beauty industry’s impact on dwindling natural resources. Most manufacturers’ fragrance ingredients are grown, perhaps “from the lavender fields of France” or from the roots of a certain type of tree, Britton says, which requires land, water and agrochemical use.
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“Whenever people want these products, they have to effectively use agriculture to get them,” Britton explains. “The fragrance industry has been very good at hiding the fact that most fragrances are actually chemically derived. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that they are made from petroleum-based synthesis. And that’s exactly what we we’re trying to change.”
“There could be 200 or 300 compounds all at different levels. And you have to be able to mimic them exactly in a bioreactor.”
When it comes to fragrances, Debut aims to “mimic nature”. Sometimes, that means mirroring a single ingredient, a process not unlike making wine or beer, in which an aqueous, sugary solution is mixed with a cell, but instead of producing wine or beer, it produces a fragrance pattern, explains Britton . It is a method that involves limited use of land, the absence of agricultural chemicals and “very little waste”.
Of course, some perfumes “are very complex blends” that require a careful balance of different notes — and Debut has developed the technology to replicate those, too, Britton says. “The nose is so sensitive that if you smell the fragrance of a root, for example, what you’ll see is that there might be 200 or 300 compounds, all at different levels,” she explains. “And you have to be able to mimic that exactly in a bioreactor. If you [don’t]then you won’t smell the same and the product won’t be successful.”
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The debut is about putting successful products in the hands of consumers, forgoing the standard horizontal integration model of biotechnology, whereby companies seek a scientific solution that is then produced on a very small scale for a vertical solution that emphasizes the end consumer and the product from the beginning, according to Britton.
“When we think about how to bring synthetic biology to people, we do it in the form of tangible products,” Britton says. “This means we not only need to do pioneering research, but also engage with our consumers and users. We need to understand how to make formulations. We need to make physical products.”