← Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
The Science of Skincare: How Pharma Innovation is Redefining Beauty with Mark Menning, PhD
00:25:46
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This is coffee number five. I'm your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hi guys. Welcome back to Caffeine Coffee number five. Yes, I need extra coffee this morning. It was one of those mornings. Anyway, I'm, you know, I love beauty industry, I love my beauty products and I love marketing and I love to understand what's going and how we evolve and I mean in my life I remember when we got the first clinics color coded products that they will tell us depends of our skincare line. And that was revolutionary back then. But I feel like we evolved so much in the industry and there is so much going on. But at the same time I have to say that sometimes I'm a little disappointed. Disappointed because I feel like there is a lot of the same. So I wanted to bring you today an innovator in this space, but someone backed by science and that really we can talk about how to have a not only a successful skincare line, but a skin care line that makes a difference. So welcome. Marc Manning, thank you so much for being here. And you are the, the founder of Mark Los Angeles skincare line. But also you have an incredible journey and you were telling me a little bit before the show about how you started. So why you don't share it with us now? Because I want everyone to hear your story.
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Hi Laura, thanks for that introduction and thanks for having me on your podcast. Really appreciate it. And before I get started, you know, I want to say yes, I do have my coffee and I want to give a shout out to Canyon Coffee. It's one of my favorite coffee roasters in la. And so anyways, sorry, try that. It's. But yeah, they have a cute shop in Echo park, you know, where all the beautiful LA people hang out and, but anyways, back to skincare and science and yeah, I mean I have a background in chemical engineering, practiced in the pharmaceutical industry for 20 plus years and really focusing on drug delivery. It's, you know, in pharmaceutics it's really about ensuring compliance and compliance through dosage, form, simplicity and more importantly, you want the pill in this case and most of the products I worked on were oral solid dosage. So you want that to behave. It has to give a profile of absorption consistently. Otherwise you know, the disease state will be, you know, the patient will be compromised if it has too little, you know, you'll, you'll not suppress whatever symptoms you're treating and if it's too much, you'll have side effects. So you have to really operate within a certain window and so that's really where I hone my expertise and, you know, got to work on some amazing drugs, especially for combination products for hiv. And those are really, really challenging because you're applying three, four different molecules, each with a different, you know, behavior in the body. And how do you optimize for that? And they, more often than not, don't like to play together in a tablet. So that. And how I got into skin care is kind of the interesting questions because, you know, I then went on to have my own pharmaceutical company in the Bay Area, and then I sold that. And with that, you know, I couldn't work in the pharmaceutical industry, so I pivoted into skincare, and that's how I ended up here today.
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And so it's a little different because in skincare you don't have the regulations that you have in by FDA or. Back then we didn't have them. Now it's changing a little bit.
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It is, yeah. And definitely it's. That's both a pro and a con. The pro is that you have a little more freedom to operate. The con is that, you know, the barrier to entry is a little. Is more open, so anybody can really develop a skincare product. And so, um, and then same thing. Even with manufacturing facilities, it's kind of shocking how, like, I wouldn't, you know, it's, it's. It's, you know, different design philosophy or different design criteria altogether with like, pharmaceutical plant and. Versus cosmetic. Cosmetic is probably closer to like food manufacturing in a way.
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Yeah. So I have a question for you, because we were talking before about delivery, and I think delivery, and I was talking to two people in the industry that we agree that what the innovation in the industry could be is either ingredients or delivery.
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Right. And with ingredients, it has to be paired with delivery as well. I mean, just because something is water soluble, I can almost guarantee you it does not mean it's going to translate into penetration of the skin generally.
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Please explain to our audience what delivery is.
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Delivery? Well, I mean, in the broadest sense, you want to, you know, where is your current site of that you want to deliver it to or wherever the disease state is or what have you. Like, in the case of inflammation, that's generally driven by like an immune response in the dermis. It's not necessarily on the top of the skin. And so how do you then deliver or penetrate deep into the dermis to, you know, bring that. Bring the molecule into that state wherever you, you know, wish to, you know, I guess, treat it. I use that word loosely.
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Because I heard people talking about patenting, patenting a delivery. Is that possible?
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Yeah, you can, I mean, as long as it's novel. I mean the classic delivery system are like liposomal structures. So these are lips, lipid based structures, usually with like you're mimicking like cellular membranes. And so those can theoretically penetrate the skin. And you know, I did write a couple patents on my delivery system because it's basically a self assembling emulsion without an oil phase. And that's kind of the novel component of it. It's just that, you know, we use a class of compounds called flavonoids and these are what plants produce to protect themselves from pathogens and environmental stress. And so. And to date they've been difficult to penetrate into the skin. And so that's where you know, again I use my background to both solubilize and then stabilize them in the formulation and then deliver this. You know, that's when we think about pharmaceutical development. It's, you know, it's the formulation composition, it's stability as well, and then you know, the whole delivery mechanism as well.
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So when you were talking about creating a brand, what do you think is more important to focus in the delivery or in novelty and ingredients?
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I think at the end of the day it's more efficacy. It's one thing to have a delivery system, it's one thing to have certain ingredients, but if that's your story and that's where it ends, then that's just kind of a marketing descriptor. At the end of the day it has to help, in my view, has to help patients with whatever conditions they wish to, to solve for.
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And so when I have so many questions that I'm trying to put my thoughts because it's, it's incredible to have the opportunity to talk to a science and scientist behind the story of a brand. So how did you started with your brand? What were you resolving a problem? You knew that you want to have a brand? What's the story behind Mark Los Angeles?
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No, it's a great story to look back on. It's, it's funny where you just, I think, well, and you'll understand this like branding and I think I've heard you talk about this before, is branding just, just doesn't stop after you do that branding exercise. It's a living process and I think that's something you need to revisit, you know, a few times a year. And so it's currently what I'm going through. You know, to answer your question, what I initially set out to solve is when I sold my pharmaceutical company, I was actually losing a lot of hair and stress in that process. So he, you know, I wanted to come up with a method that wasn't, didn't contain like finasteride or minoxidil, but using just plant active ingredients and combed through the literature found this class. I was familiar with flavonoids and their potent anti inflammatory properties. But then if you see in the lab setting, they were shown to actually affect the signaling associated with hair loss. And so that's where I started initially. And then, you know, came up with formula, applied it to my hair and then I saw a regrowth in kind of the crown of my head and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And so that was kind of the proof of concept. But then the reason why I didn't launch that product was because how do you like proving a clinical endpoint can take several months, you know, six months at a minimum. And so that's where, you know, I came up with the EQ line. So it's for acne. And so we had an acne clinical trial to show the endpoint of reduced inflammation and blemish.
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Clinical trials are hard and they're expensive.
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They are, yeah, definitely. And so, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. That statement unpacks so much with clinical trials because there's no guarantee. And so the question is, you know, as a brand, what if you don't have a good clinical endpoint? You know, and so I think that's where, you know, having a hardcore R and D background and you know, it's just like I'm primed for that. It's like it's okay, you'll learn something and then how do you pivot? And then it's not a failure. Failure is an opportunity to learn from, from this trial. It could be the study design itself. It could be, yeah, it doesn't work altogether. And so I don't know, it's not, you know, the failure is not really, you know, everybody says embrace failure, but it's easier said than done. And so you kind of have to prime for that. But you're absolutely right. I think they are difficult, they are expensive, but if you understand the underlying mechanism, that's a good way to de risk it initially. And then.
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Yeah, let me ask you a question because I see that first of all you have a four step routines. Do you think how big a root a routine need to be in any skincare line from science perspective? Because I really still meet a lot of People say, I don't understand how to use a serum. What is a serum?
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Right, right. That's amazing. Yeah. And then, you know, does your face need to be damp before using it or whatever?
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And there's a lot of. They don't wash your face.
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Yeah. That's shocking. So I think, yeah, just basically a cleanser, a functional serum, and, you know, optional moisturizer. Really? I mean, it depends on. And so. Yeah. Which can then get us into this sort of. I mean, what are you allowed to say with anti aging now? You know, anti wrinkle or something?
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Let's break it down for. From the clinical, scientific point of view. So what a cleanser does to your skin, the cleanser.
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So ideally, the way I formulated the cleanser is to be as gentle as possible. And so you don't need to strip your skin and go, like, nuclear on your skin to, like, eradicate everything. I think that's like maybe 1980s thinking that, you know, you need to just kind of go scorched earth. I think you can get a lot of bang for your buck with a gentle cleanser. So we're using cleansers that are safe enough to use, like, on babies, you know, So I wanted to be very gentle, but it has to be powerful and functional. And how do we do that? That's where the flavonoids come in. So we're able to then even in the cleansing step, penetrate, deliver the flavonoids and then, you know, reduce inflammation just through cleansing alone. And so we also have an exfoliating.
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Hold on. You have another exfoliating cleanser? I saw that. So why the difference between two cleansers?
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I guess male naivete. I developed it for myself, you know, and so, you know, it's like. Because I had, like. It's like I didn't know what I was doing, you know, and it's. And the reason why I developed the cleanser is because the exfoliating cleanser is just for beard, you know, to exfoliate the whiskers that are ingrown without using, like, a harsh abrasive. And so it's just, you know, it's walnut shells enough to be still gentle but not really tearing the skin. So it's a physical cleanser. Our physical exfoliant versus, you know, like a carboxylic acid or, you know, glycolic acid or what have you. Yeah.
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Okay. So then what the serum does for your skincare.
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So the serum was initially designed to be a spot treatment. So I do a lot of exercising and then So I could tell when, like, my, my helmet, my. When I go cycling is dirty because I start breaking out, like along the jawline where the strap is and along the forehead. And so I was using a lot of salicylic acid at the time. I don't like. Well, benzoyl peroxide is just too, again, too atomic of a molecule. You know, it's a, it's a, it's super oxidating substance. And so I kept breaking out, though. And so that's where I started applying, you know, the EQ that was developed specifically as a spa treatment. But when it then went out into its world, into the world and developed its own kind of following, people started, started using it as a serum. And I'm like, no, no, you know, don't use it as a serum. It's a spot treatment. They're like, no, it's amazing as a serum because it evens the tone, it reduces redness, reduces inflammation. So it kind of took a life of its own. And so we actually had to reposition it that way because people are using that way and they just intuitively got it, which was amazing.
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My next question, because I was about to tell you that how was the process of repositioning something like that?
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It was fairly easy. We just went from spa treatment to serum.
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That's what it's going to hear, people's feedback?
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Oh, absolutely. Oh, I mean, it's, it's important as a brand to take that feedback. And as much as it hurts sometimes, because we don't want to hear it, you have to, you gotta, you have to listen. You have to make them part of the process. And, and so again, that's kind of having that R and D mindset where it's like, okay, this is what I think. Like I could have spent all this energy and effort saying, no, you're using it wrong. You know, use it as a spot treatment. But it's like when people are just getting great results, you have to take that in and reposition it. You know, fortunately, we weren't really locked down in a lot of packaging, so we were able to make that change. Even scaled up the volume from, you know, smaller to about 30 mil to, I think it was 15 milliliters initially to now like 30. And. And then, you know, people with rosacea, eczema and psoriasis have been using it too, and it's just been evening their tone. And so again, that just speaks to what we know these molecules do in terms of modulating inflammation.
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And then you went ahead and you Created a health product which is a lip product.
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Yeah, that one's really exciting for me because it's again, researching the literature, some really cool summary articles showing. And again, this is the beauty of fundamental research and this is why I advocate for fundamental research. This current administration, I think is not really having that mindset, but you need to do pie in the sky research that understands mechanistically what's going on. A lot of researchers have been looking at flavonoids as potent antivirals. And so there's like, so there's two viruses. Viruses for cold sore or herpes, it's HSV1, which is primarily for cold sores. And then HSV2 is for genital herpes. And so, yeah, they summarize all this mechanistic activity. But again, the delivery system is what's really missing for, you know, so instead of just like hitting on one target, we're able to like on viral replication, we're able to go after eight different parts of replication. And so the thesis behind the lip products is really to show people like an acne patient, it could take as long as, you know, four to six months, weeks to really see results. But with the lip products, you could see it almost immediately. And so that was kind of the thesis. How do we introduce people to the technology quicker? And the lip product actually is doing that. So some people now that have been in our study haven't seen, they used to get cold sores like every month and now they have.
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Once I had a cold sore and I asked a dentist that I know and she told me a cold sore without medicine takes seven days to go away and a cold sore with medicine takes a week.
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Yeah, that's, that's exactly what happens. And you know, and the reason why.
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How is this, how this product is different and how.
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So it'll take on average of two to three days to clear it up. And then if you feel it at the first time of tingling, and you know, we have this repeatedly now and about, if you take it the first time it's tingling, it won't even form a lesion. And cold sores that have been formed, it will not get to the oozing and cracking phase. And so that's, that again shows, you know, kind of the translational component of, you know, you have research, you effectively deliver to your site of, you know, activity. And then hopefully, you know, these results translate to a clinical setting. I've been speaking with a pathologist who's an expert in HSV research and she even showed in her model that, you know, like acyclovir is a common prescribed product and in cellular studies it looks beautiful, it shows a reduction in the viral load. But clinically we know it doesn't really work that well. And she demonstrated why, because with the various skin cells, the keratinocytes and fibroblasts, acyclovir is just very difficult to penetrate. So I'm working with her to kind of, you know, elucidate more on what's going on with our system too. So it's, I think it's really exciting. It shows that you could take something that's a natural product and really exploit its benefit clinically.
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I, so when you talk about clinicals, how you conduct the clinicals, normally you just do it by observation or how does it work?
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Well, the acne clinical study was actually overseen by I think three dermatologist. So that was actually registered with clinical trials.gov. it was a full blown study. This recent cold swear study, it was easy enough for us to kind of reach out to a community and conduct it ourselves. We'll probably, we'll go back and so now we're, you know, we've gone back. It was like a proof of concept. Let's see what we can do to get this to the market quicker. And now we're working with dermatologists and you know, under their guidance and just building.
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How do you compare them to the experience of doing a full blown clinical trial that will work now in community?
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Yeah, the community. Well, it's not for every condition too, I think cold sore. The patient population is very, has a certain level of heightened awareness and advocacy. They know what works and doesn't work. They're going to call BS like immediately. And so, you know, we, we had, you know, 50 people participating in our study, got 25 respondents, which is about right. And so those 25 respondents, we had 95% reporting, you know, a significant shift in their healing time. And so, you know, then we have an interview with them and follow up, you know, and, and so it's, it's pretty extensive. So I think, you know, and it, it was when we had like a call for participation, we had to shut it down within a couple hours because we had over 500 respondents. Like, wow.
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And what, where, where did you put that in the community?
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It was, we just kind of pushed it out and it just, and that's how like people are, you know, that's how hungry people are for something that works and they're willing to try new products. So I think it's really exciting to see. Now we are in the domain where you are. It's like, it's the marketing side and it's, you know, we're in an era now if you have a cure for cancer, I don't know if that messaging will get out even. And so we have this amazing product for cold tours now. It's just really, how do we fight the noise. Noise and you know, get. Get that messaging out.
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Absolutely. So what do you see happening in the industry? Beauty, wellness or beauty and wellness combined? What do you think as an, as a scientist in this space? What. What's next?
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Well, I think, you know, going back to the, like the whole wrinkle component and longevity.
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Longevity, because we were talking about that and used.
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Right.
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Everyone is talking about longevity, but nobody knows even what it means.
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Yeah, nobody knows what it means. And more importantly, what is your clinical endpoint? Because you have to follow people like, statistically to see if, you know, like longevity, like, like how, like it's hard enough to attribute diet to longevity or diet to, you know, like lifespan. We know, like a healthy, you know, diet and exercise, generally speaking, leads to better outcomes. But also like skin is like, how do you tease out that noise? And so I think, yeah. What is your clinical endpoint, basically? I mean, I guess there are biomarkers that you could follow. But again, how does that translate to, you know, skin elasticity and you know, youthful appearance, what have you. But I think in that realm, with respect to like anti aging and things like that and wrinkles and what you see is like a lot of trends for in office procedures. So a lot of like fillers and like Botox. I think that's the way people are kind of gravitating towards like in office procedures to kind of correct those type of problems. And. And then, you know, I don't think they're relying more on like lotions and creams. So if you really want to see an effect, I think going into an aesthetic setting makes sense.
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A combination. Right now you need to get treatments that it can done in spas or Medispas, and then you need to complement it or maintain with the right products.
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Absolutely. Yeah. Well said. No, I totally agree with that. And with respect to where we're kind of leaning into with our messaging is really, you know, what is the problem statement? It's really, you know, like inflammation is becoming kind of the enemy of the new enemy, if you will, because it's related to premature aging. It's related to, you know, overall skin health. And so that's Kind of where we're like positioning ourselves is, you know, these flavonoids are known. This is again, what's interesting about the brand story. I didn't set out to kind of, you know, with this target in mind. It's like, you know, there's like a problem, come up with a solution and then, you know, when you start seeing a lot of overlap with inflammation, it starts to make sense. Then that's how you develop your story. And that's where I think you need to keep going back to your brand messaging is to really reevaluate. So, like, how does it come into focus? And I think the problem statement really is, is a commonality in a lot of skin conditions. And, you know, how do we solve for that problem? Well, it's really the delivery system using flavonoids, which are potent anti inflammatories to, you know, to generate effective skin care.
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Amazing. Okay, well, thank you so much for all this information, Mark, but I have one more question for you before.
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Yes?
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How do you copy black?
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There's no other way, really, except in Italy, you know, maybe a good latte or cappuccino there. But yeah, 100. Black.
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Black. Really strong or black and with like, with a lot of water. That is not strong.
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Black balance. And that's why I mentioned, you know, going back to Canon coffee. They have a good roast. Yeah, too dark of a roast. It's overpower. But I think to really taste the bitterness and complexity of the beans, black is the way to go.
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Thank you for sharing that and thank you guys. Keep sipping your coffee and I will see you next week with more coffee number five.
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Thanks so much, Laura.
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Find everything you need at larashmoistman.com or in the episode notes right below. Don't forget to subscribe. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side. Ciao, ciao.