Earlier this month our founders, Drs. Rebecca (Horan) Lacouture and Greg Altman, sat with NBC Boston’s Brian Shactman on NECN’s CEO Corner. Below are snippets from their conversation and links to the full interview.

Describe the founding ethos for your skincare brand.

“We asked ourselves, ‘What can be done [from a social and skincare perspective] to preserve human health?’”

As is often the case, it took cancer and parenthood to inspire co-founders, Rebecca and Greg, to start reading labels on personal care products. Despite PhDs, and despite having two biomedical device companies under their belts, both were startled by the ingredients common to skincare. They founded Silk Therapeutics in 2013 to develop silk technologies that could clean-up skincare and other consumer product industries that contribute to the global burden of chronic disease. 

How difficult was it to come up with the process of transforming a silk cocoon to a liquid silk solution?

“We spent a year trying to attain a shelf-stable pure liquid form of silk protein, and maintain that process up to a commercial scale”

They relied on their research and management experience, assembled a team, and set to work designing a process to make high-quality, scalable silk protein in liquid form. Their patented, liquid silk formulations now serve as the basis for all Silk Therapeutics’ products. Silk plays multiple roles, including firming the feel of skin, and helping to stabilize and enhance delivery of antioxidants and other active ingredients.

What was the most important aspect of your experience adapting to the skincare space from the medical device industry?

“We need to give our customers the confidence and trust that we have applied the same rigor we would in the production of a medical device [as we would] to our skincare products.”
Lacouture and Altman next built partnerships with select New England spas, medi-spas, and dermatologists, who helped them refine their formulations. The result: one of the cleanest, clinical-grade lines of luxury skincare on the market.

But performance skincare is only the beginning. “The challenge,” said Altman, “becomes how to apply silk as a natural, clean polymer to other avenues that relate to human health.”

Watch here: 

http://www.necn.com/news/business/WEB-CEO-Corner-A_NECN-409670905.html

http://www.necn.com/news/business/WEB-CEO-Corner-B_NECN-409670495.html

http://www.necn.com/on-air/as-seen-on/WEB-CEO-Corner-C_NECN-409669805.html