Skinbiotherapeutics PLC (LON:SBTX) Chief Executive Officer Dr Cath O’Neill caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss how they have progressed since FY results, how their SkinBiotix technology works, the significance of the scale-up and the formulations, the next key milestones and the progress for possible commercial partners.
Q1: Cath, can you tell us how the company has progressed since the full year results in October?
A1: Yes, we remain very much on track to hit our milestones. If you remember, in our admission document, our major major milestone is a human study in Q3 of this year and we’re very much on track to hit that milestone.
So, to this end, we’ve achieved some manufacturer scale-up and we’ve now got some formulations in the laboratory that we’re testing so all these little building blocks enable us to keep to the schedule we said in our AIM document and we’ll be initiating our human study for our cosmetic application in Q3.
Q2: Can you remind us what Skinbiotherapeutics does and how its SkinBiotix® technology actually works?
A2: So, our SkinBiotix technology is a lysate, an extract derived from a probiotic bacterium and we apply that to the skin. It has some really good activities on skin, so it can boost the barrier of the skin and make it stronger, it can stop nasty pathogenic bacteria from attaching to the skin and it can also accelerate wound healing. As a company, the applications that we’re looking at of that technology are a cosmetic, an anti-infective and also an eczema therapy.
Q3: So, what do those areas entail?
A3: Well, the cosmetic is really based on the barrier building activity of SkinBiotix, inflection control based on its ability to inhibit nasty pathogens and eczema which is kind of based on the two above so eczematous skin has a weak barrier and it also gets infected a lot by one particular pathogen, staphylococcal aureus.
So, because our technology can both boost the barrier and inhibits staphylococcal aureus, it makes it a really good potential therapy for eczema. So those are the three, cosmetic, an infection control product and an eczema therapy.
Q4: Can you explain the significance of the successful scale-up and the formulation that you mentioned earlier?
A4: This is a key milestone set out at our IPO so achieving these steps, it enables us to take our first programme in skincare through to human trials because without any scale-up or formulation it’s very difficult to do a human study.
Q5: So, what will the next milestone be for your programmes? Are you on track to commercialise the cosmetic product in 2018?
A5: Yes, we are. So, we always said that we’d be fairly light touch with talks around commercialisation until we’d got that data from the human study because that’s a major value inflection point and having human data changes the whole conversation you can have with potential licensees.
So, our next steps are very much to continue with industrial level scale-up now, test our formulations and then enter that human study in Q3 of this year.
Q6: What about the other programmes, how long will it take you to get other products on to the market?
A6: So, our pipeline shows commercialisation of our first product in 2018, the other programmes are progressing and commercialisation of those is scheduled for 2020, 2021 and 2022, again that was laid out in our admission document and we’re still on track to achieve that. The reason the other products are a bit longer is because of the regulatory hurdles that we have to jump over in order to bring those products to market so there are huge regulatory dossiers that we have to prepare before we can take those into trials so that’s why they’re a little further down the line.
Q7: If you’re not launching products yourself and you’re looking for possible commercial partners to license out, how have the discussions progressed since we last spoke?
A7: Ok, so even before our IPO, I’ve had ties within the industry for a lot of years and so, we’ve been continuing working on these existing relationships. We’re in a very strong position as a science-led business to progress these discussions but obviously, at this stage, I can’t really say anything more about that.
