Empowered Patient Podcast Addressing the Skin Microbiome with Topical Engineered Microbes with Francisco Salva Azitra
Francisco Salva, President and CEO of Azitra, Inc., is leveraging the microbial bacteria that comprise the skin microbiome and exploring novel methods to deliver precision medicines to the skin. Azitra has genetically engineered specific strains of these microbes to produce proteins that are missing in patients with skin conditions like Netherton syndrome and cancer therapy-associated rashes. These bacterial strains have the ability to get beneath the stratum corneum and turn into miniature factories to make the therapeutic proteins and help the skin return to homeostasis.
Francisco explains, "We're leveraging the billions of microbial bacteria that naturally live on us and are synergistic with our skin to help keep our skin in homeostasis or a regulated standard of existence. These bacteria makeup that are known as the skin microbiome, we have built up a library of these microbial bacteria strains commonly found on normal people and characterize them in a way that allows us to look for specific strains that may be able to deliver special proteins that may be missing or aberrantly made in the skin."
"What we're leveraging is that microbial strain’s ability to get past the outer protective layer of the skin called the stratum corneum. And these microbial strains get through that outer layer through intermittent spaces between the hair and that outer skin layer, the stratum corneum, and are able to get underneath the stratum corneum, grow, multiply, and colonize. And so by genetically engineering specific strains of these microbes, we're able to synthetically, or also known as recombinantly, make proteins that are missing in the patient's skin."
"It's a little bit newer than the gut microbiome, and the field of study is also a little bit newer. And so the development of the understanding of the microbiome, which is what they call the defined consortia of various strains that normally live on us, is not quite as well elucidated as it is in the gut microbiome. That said, our mission at Azitra isn't to try to reset the entire regulation of the entire skin microbiome, but really just leverage specific strains of these bacteria that have the ability to get underneath that external layer of the skin."
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