039 - What I'm Reading: Week of April 15th
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 Links in this newsletter route back to my blog or directly to the original content.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
💭 Although I know most people get excited about new launches, what clearly excites me is the new research. This week there is a ton of breakthrough research: turning skin cells back 30 years (hold your breath it is not ready for prime time), 3,200 the number of cell mutations when a mammal dies (across 16 species), a nasal spray that can stop inflammation linked memory loss associated with Alzheimers, using waste plastic to capture carbon and more.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
The newest class at Snap’s Yellow Accelerator includes Ettos, a Colombian e-commerce beauty platform.
TikTok’s ad revenue is projected to surpass the combined revenue of both Twitter & Snap.
NPD and IRI announced a merger, making it the leading data analytics platform for CPG.
Whatsapp is launching communities.
😴 🇨🇳 A look at the sleep economy opportunity in China. Kuaishou, TikTok’s rival, recently hosted a show called Go To Bed At 11 PM (11点睡吧) at 8 PM. It airs every Tuesday and Thursday night, featuring celebrities competing to fall asleep by 11pm with the help bed doctors and experts. As wellness, and awareness around the importance of sleep come front & center in China, sleep solutions are expected to take off.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
Travis Barker…former Blink 182 frontman, now Kourtney Kardashian’s partner, has launched a line of CBD products called Barker Wellness Co.
Hailey Bieber’s skincare line called Rhode, is launching in June.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
⭐️ Therabody, known for their muscle recovery products launched a multifaceted face device called The TheraFace Pro. The device includes: 3 percussive attachments (Cone, Micro-Point, Flat), Microcurrent Ring, LED Light Therapy Ring (Red, Blue, & Infrared Light), & Cleansing Ring. It takes all of the existing facial care device technologies, and jams it into one.
⭐️ FACET, a new Telehealth skincare platform from the Thirty Madison group, offering support & prescription solutions for Eczema, Psoriasis, Acne, Rosacea, Dandruff, Melasma, Anti-Aging.
Skintrust Club, found 63% do not know their correct skin type. The study asked women to self-identify their skin type, and then swab their skin for microbial and genomic analysis. Frankly, this mismatch is not surprising, the industry language used to describe skin types versus actual skin-type has always been dicey.
🇻🇳 Aemi Beauty, a newly launched B2B wholesale beauty platform, specializing in low MLQs and transparency in Vietnam.
☀️ Sun Patch, out of Southern California, claims to be the first sun patch on the market, under eye silicone gel UVA 50+ infused patches. These launched in July 2021, if you dig a bit deeper, these products have been present in Korea for quite some time, often called ‘golf patches’ with a number of brands selling different patches for the under eye and face (Hanol, Avajar, Le Mouton)
🇮🇳 Light Up Beauty is a superfood led beauty brand out of India.
💄 Beauty AI, a startup founded by Elizabeth Whitelaw & Mira Shalah Abboud are developing the first automatic make-up application system, capable of realtime color mixing and automated airbrush mechanics to achieve a full look in 2-minutes.
Whatskin?, a new skincare recommendation app using a questionnaire, photos, estheticians, and a patented biomarker to assign a skin score and recommend skincare. After going through the experience, it really felt like Perfect Corp., there is no personal interaction with a skin professional. The ‘biomarker’ test appears to be a pH, oil, or hydration measurement.
One Skin launches into body care.
👩🦱 Haircare:
Nole.Care, a new waterless and plastic free haircare brand founded by Alida Boer.
Captain Blankenship, has redesigned its packaging and product lines to focus on hair and put sustainability at its core.
💊 Supplements:
⭐️ 🥬 Season Health out of Austin, TX, a food recommendation platform, recently raised $34M in Series A funding. Unlike other healthy food delivery services, this startup pairs users with a chef & dietician for personalized guidance with the philosophy of food as medicine to treat end-to-end conditions. Think of this as the evolution of Blue Apron, Daily Harvest, or a Sunbasket to a service first approach.
⭐️ 🇮🇳 YourStory dives into India’s Juicy Chemistry’s shift into lifestyle and nutrition to sustain their successful growth beyond skincare.
Seed expands it’s offering to kids, with a powdered synbiotic.
🤔 Chronic Youth, a marine collagen peptide & hyaluronic acid beauty powder supplement, uses “clinically proven ingredients”. Where things get weird are the ‘clinical tests’. The first clinical study is a perception study, where the scales are not marked (so the meaning is lost). The second study uses instruments to measure change; however, what they are calling significant, is not technically statistically significant.
♻️ Sustainable Design:
Alibaba’s e-commerce platform T-Mall, launched carbon emissions labels to help convey to consumers the environmental impact of products. The platform has started by labelling electronic products, and will move into other categories.
👩🔬 Femtech:
🇲🇽 Meet Plena, a Mexican gynecological Telehealth and in-person services.
Emmeline Ventures, a new seed stage fund focusing on women’s health, sustainability, and fintech.
Her Place, a female empowerment sex-positive brand, is launching into personal care with soaps, scents, and more.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
⭐️👂 Frequency Therapeutics, an MIT spin-off, is developing therapies for hearing loss due to hair cell death. Their therapies reprogram ‘progenitor cells’ which promote hair cell growth, to restore speech perception. They are currently seeking participants for a clinical trial.
BUZUD, a Singapore based medical device manufacturer, launched two smartwatches with blood oxygen level detectors to monitor sleep apnea.
Google acquired FitBit received FDA approval for AFib detection algorithm, FitBit claims the technology is akin to ‘always on monitoring’.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have developed a rapid spit test to scan for viruses including COVID. The sensors are low-cost to produce at scale, potentially $1, offering a possible solution to mass rapid testing.
🔬RESEARCH
P&G patented a new way of delivering more anti-dandruff agents to the scalp, this will allow for a greater deposition of actives, and few actives rinsed down the drain.
⭐️♀🧬 For years views towards hormonal (estrogen/progesterone) therapies for menopause have been strongly linked to breast cancer, a new genomic study with 62,370 women found no conclusive genetic link between MHT (menopausal hormone therapy) and breast cancer. *A big caveat, the subjects in this study were ALL of European descent, so this is not the most diverse offering.*
🦠 Researchers at MIT devised a method to protect gut microbiota from the harmful effects of antibiotics.
♻️ A lab at Rice University devised a method using plastic waste (polyolefin plastics - single and multistream plastics) to capture carbon when in the presence of potassium acetate. A major breakthrough for power plants and plastic recycling.
🫶 Skin
A review on atopic dermatitis and the link between the presence of Staphylococcus aureus, organizes findings of various therapies with promising results.
🤸♀️ 🇨🇳 A paper published in Nature looks at the relationship between microbial/bacterial diversity, gyms, and human health. The study swabbed gym equipment in China, finding pathogenic bacteria and potentially cancer causing microbes. Although diversity of microbes across gyms is high, consistency varies, which raises a need for far more studies. Still the findings are quite alarming.
🧓 Aging
⭐️ Researchers at Cambridge University, were able to turn 53 year old skin cells into cells that looked and behaved like that of 23 year old in 12 days through a method called, “maturation phase transient reprogramming”, a similar method used to create ‘Dolly’, the short lived cloned sheep. In order to measure cellular aging, researchers examined a number of factors:
Epigenetic clock: ‘methylation tags used to measure aging’
Transcriptome: ‘gene readouts from a cell’
Cell function: the rejuvenated fibroblasts, produced more collagen protein than cells that had not undergone reprogramming, and were quicker to repair damaged areas.
The hope is this research will lead to further anti-aging therapies. Right now far more tests need to be conducted before human use, due to the method’s link to increase cancers.
⭐️ A team out of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, published findings examining the somatic mutation of cells across a lifetime across 16 different mammalian species (including humans), revealing on average there were 3,200 mutations across a lifetime. These findings are even more interesting when taking into consideration the differences in life-span across these different species, where the mutation rates of some species are much faster (they die younger) than others, yet the average number of mutations in cells prior to death still falls within the same range.
🧠 In the past two weeks, a few papers have been published in Nature on Alzheimers, with promising finds.
Researchers identified 42 more genes strongly linked to Alzheimers, now there are 75 genes that can be screened for increased risk.
A novel nasal spray capable of reducing neural inflammation, resulted in a stop of memory loss in mice, showing promising results for a potential Alzheimers treatment.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ GWI - The Latest Trends for Generation Z.
FINSMES: Beauty Tech - The Main Trends in The Industry. This is a look at the top trending non-invasive esthetician treatments.
Deloitte: 2022 Digital Media Trend - Toward the Metaverse. A look at views on streaming, subscription services, ads, gaming as an emotional outlet, and more.
⭐️ CB Insights: The Companies Making the Metaverse a Reality
SensorTower: Global App Revenue Growth Was Flat in Q1 2022, While Usage Grew Nearly 5%. TikTok is the top downloaded app, as well as the app with the most in-app revenue, ahead of Facebook and Instagram.
McKinsey: Aging as a Healthcare Opportunity.
⭐️ a16z: The Marketplace 100 - 2022. A look at the top companies, new entrants, and the biggest movers.
CB Insights: Q1 2022 State of Digital Health Report.
Female Founders Fund: 2021 Review of Funding for Female Founders.
💡Enjoy,
-Anne