Mitra Bio: Regenerative skin care comes to forefront with epigenetics
22 May 2025 | Mitra Bio
The personal care industry is increasingly investigating cellular aging and cultivating solutions that tackle skin aging before it reaches the surface. We speak to Shakiba Kaveh, the founder and CEO of Mitra Bio, about how the company supports beauty brands in obtaining insights into how their treatments affect skin aging and rejuvenation in vivo.
This is Sabina Waldeck for Personal Care Insights.
Joining me today is Shakiba Cave, the founder and CEO of Micro Bio.
Welcome, Shakiba.
Thanks for having me, Sabi.
OK, so let's jump right into it.
Can you define longevity-based skincare and how it contrasts with solely anti-aging solutions?
Yeah, sure.
So, anti-aging, , skincare is a very big market right now and it's been around for maybe 100 years since the retinoids were were discovered.
They are basically targeting the, the signs of aging like wrinkles after they, they've appeared on the skin.
And over the past few years we've seen a massive shift through anti-aging to healthy aging that we're not fighting the, the signs of aging, but we want to age better or age slower or age, you know, in a healthier way.
So there has been many publications in the past few years to understand what aging is, what is the , root cause of this, cellular aging is, and, develop interventions that target the aging mechanism as opposed to wait until you have the signs of aging and then go, go after them.
So, and I think, you know, from the consumer point of view, You know, people are also not want to wait until they've aged.
They want to have more preventative measures and, you know, have more organic, ingredients to, you know, to have a healthy way of aging and instead of just, you know, have a reactive, solutions to it.
Mhm.
And since like longevity is such a big buzzword now, could you explain why you think it's just now becoming this huge thing in the industry?
I think, simply because a few, key research works that have emerged in the, in the past 5 years, you know, everyone wants to stop aging or reverse it, but I think, you know, that we've, we've had sort of understanding what the aging mechanism is first of all, and, you know, we've seen a few.
Papers that have targeted the the aging itself and you know, and this is in the the the the the disease space but moving into a wellness space, we've also seen sort of in the, in the skin space I've seen wellness colliding with aesthetics is that, you know, for example, with the, you know, with the skin cancer and all the Preventative ways to prevent it, but at the same time, you know, keeping the, the skin looking and feeling younger.
I think that's, you know, that, that's the trend I've seen that the consumers are not They do not want to pay for, you know, the red retinols, but they want to.
Pay for healthy aging instead.
And this is why we've seen, you know, brands, positioning themselves into healthy aging.
Mhm.
And another thing with this healthy aging is epigenetics, which is also being used more and more by, brands and manufacturers and developers.
And what role do you think epigenetics is playing in the skincare industry lately and where do you expect it to go going forward?
Yeah, so this is, you know, my own startup Microbio was born out of the excitement for epigenetics.
So epigenetic is, not only what the genes you're born with, but much of your aging and your quality of life is to do with the, how, how your skin.
Intacts with the environment and what the products that you put on on the skin, so that derives much of the aging process and the epigenetic clock has, has been important in quantified aging itself because you need to measure the aging first in order to stop it or to make it smaller or to reverse it.
So, so in order to screen or the, or discover new compounds, you need to have a benchmark.
You need to have a measurement in order to find what ingredients.
So what I've seen is epigenetic clocks being used or, you know, there are many other omics clocks that basically quantify the aging processes in the cell do.
Is they're very useful for Understanding the aging itself and then finding out what interventions are targeting that.
And at Microbio we've worked with in over 20 clinical trials right now looking at hero molecules for the skin.
We've also done trials on supplement lifestyle, even with laser interventions on how they're targeting the skin, and I have to say that.
That the longevity space in the skin is very much advanced as opposed to the other because the skin is something you can see it as , and there's been some great intervention and molecule that have been developed for, for it.
And you mentioned epigenetic clocks.
So could you give a brief explanation of Mitra Bio's epigenetic clock and how it works in developing skin solutions?
Yeah, so, so epigenetics is basically tissue specific.
You're looking at these methylation groups on top of the DNA which switch on and off the gene expression.
So what proteins are actually expressed.
So, So, and then it's tissue specific.
So we've seen a lot of blood-based epigenetic clots, saliva-based, but we haven't seen much skin.
And, you know, we, we've seen like a lot of, you know, biopsy-based clock where they take a biopsy from the skin, but, but the problem that we faced early on with Microbio five years ago when we started with my, with my co-co-founder, there is lack of samples in driving the development of these epigenetic clocks that the, you know, there are not so many people would want to have a biopsy.
So, we have developed the first ever skin clock that works on keratinocytes that are extracted non-invasively from the skin.
So we use tape stripping, which is an adhesive tape you put on anywhere on your skin, and we are collecting basically the outer layers of the skin which originate from the basal cell.
So what you can see is that these DNA methylation patterns we've seen that they change, you know, after a few, after a few months of intervention they actually originate from the basal cell.
There's a very good paper on it in Nature that that shows, , you know, these methylation patterns are imprinted once they differentiate upward, and we've developed a non-invasive way to extract the skin cells and actually read these methylation signatures at a very high resolution which do not need a lot of DNA.
So this was really our Inventive step and once we've enabled that, that made us free into increasing our sample size.
So we are in trials involving hundreds of individuals that longitudinally they're measuring their, their skin age, you know, every 2 or 33 months.
So we are getting a very good picture on how interventions are being changed.
On the methylation landscape, which is something that we've never seen in the past, right?
Which is quite exciting and, yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely exciting.
And what role do you think that Mra bio plays overall in the development of regenerative skincare solutions?
So what, you know, we would love to see is that because, you know, we've unleashed access to data from the skin, and we can do it longitudinally, easily, non-invasively, this will, sort of shine light into the darkness of aging, and we can sample more people, we can be more inclusive, we can , we can include more ethnicities in our trials.
We can, do it for longer.
We can look at many interventions and, and this will unleash new markers that we can then develop new molecules.
So, so this is where we are super excited that we finally have an easy access, scalable, democratized tool.
That we can read stuff that you cannot see, you know, with the skin, you know, a lot of people ask me, you just take a photo of the skin and you can see the wrinkles, or you can see the pig pig pigmentation, but a lot of times what we see, so for example, a lot of Inflammation in the skin, especially in the in the in the melanin-rich skin types, so skin types 45, you cannot see inflammation with the naked eye or you cannot see improvement in the skin in, in after 2 months of using an intervention.
It's something that you can, your naked eye or even, you know, the most sophisticated.
Imaging tool they cannot pick up, and this is what we want to enable, it's like something that you cannot see with the naked eye.
And do you have anything else to add that you feel like we haven't covered today?
I think, I think, you know, biomarkers and, and what they can tell you about the, the, the like predictive markers, right?
So, so right now, if you, you know, feel tired, you go and have a blood test and they tell you your vitamin D is low.
But I think What would help is if I had told you something that you could have prevented before it's onset, that it's always easier.
So, and I think the, the, I think these markers, these insights which tell you the news in the, in, in the future are important because then you can, you know, And understand how diseases become about and how you can pre prevent them.
And this is, this is sort of a dark space right now, but, but it's very exciting, where it's going.
Yeah, definitely.
And I appreciate you speaking with me and sharing your insights and thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
