An interview with Symbiome founder Larry Weiss, MD

Dara: Your mission with Symbiome has been to help restore the critical missing pieces of the skin’s microbiome that we’ve lost with our modern-day lifestyle. How do these products accomplish that?

LARRY: Thanks to the Yanomami, we know what the output of a healthy microbiome looks like; it’s the antioxidant protection and essential nourishment that lead to healthy, resilient skin. 

We also know that the bacteria we’ve lost from our skin microbiome — bacteria they still have in theirs — also cover the plants that surround the Yanomami in the Amazon. That ecosystem of bacteria, that biofilm, is a function of the environment; the air is alive and enables a harmonization between them.

As I mentioned, you can’t just figure out what bacteria are missing and put live bacteria back on the skin because our immune system hasn’t seen most of them before. Plus, when you take a probiotic, you’re presuming that it’s got enough of a foothold to find its way in and stay there. Probiotics are usually freeze-dried bacteria that need to hydrate, wake up, start turning on their machinery, find a place to live, build a house, raise kids, all that other kind of stuff (if they’re still alive at all by the time they get to any of that). It’s a very unpredictable process: that set of steps is going to be a little bit different from one person to the next.

But what you can do is take the plants with the intact ecosystem on their surface and allow them to naturally ferment. Here, you’re working with postbiotics. Postbiotics allow for  a much more consistent result.

Dara: Quick pause — most of us are familiar with probiotics and somewhat familiar with prebiotics, but much less so with postbiotics. How would you explain the three and how they work together?

LARRY:

The simplest way to think about this is to consider the probiotics as the centerpiece. They’re living microorganisms — they can continue to reproduce themselves — that have beneficial effects.

Prebiotics are food for those beneficial bacteria.

When prebiotics feed the probiotics, the probiotics make postbiotics: the beneficial stuff they make. That “stuff” can be anything from a single molecule to an entire community of dead bacteria.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated.

- The probiotics are the simple things; they’re alive. If they’re not, they’re not probiotics.

- But prebiotics and postbiotics overlap, because a postbiotic that was made by a probiotic, that’s beneficial, can be a prebiotic for other bacteria within the ecosystem. So that product can be someone else’s food.

When I describe the way this works to people, I always tell them this: the study of the microbiome is complicated, and it’s early, so while this framework can help us understand things to make better decisions, we need to be open to data that might come in and challenge it.

Science is a disciplined practice of wonder. It’s driven by our sense of curiosity and our desire to make things better, but it needs to be tempered by a very deep sense of humility. Remember Weiss’s first law: most things are more complicated than you can imagine that they are!

Dara: Well, we have something to work with now. So if probiotics are challenging and unpredictable to work with, and postbiotics are the beneficial things that the probiotics produce—the things that our skin needs—you’re skipping ahead to use those. 

LARRY: Yes. If you take the specific plants from the Amazonian environment of the Yanomami — plants that have that ecosystem intact on their surface — and allow them to naturally ferment, they’ll express many of the missing gene pathways that we need. Postbiotics don’t depend on your ecosystem and your body going through a whole set of steps; they’re so complex and self-regulating that they just keep the ecosystem intact. And we built precision ferments to fill in those missing gaps: the antioxidant protection and essential nourishment that skin needs for resilience.

Dara: How did you do that?

LARRY: First, we had to find the right plants — ones that grow abundantly enough so that we could sustainably source them from the same ecosystem of the Yanomami, from Amazonia. And we wanted to find ones that these communities like the Yanomami have had relationships with for 10,000 to 12,000 years, ones that they’ve safely used for all this time in their own food and medicines.

Then we had to ferment them, because fermentation is the connective tissue of biologic life; that process gives you the postbiotics, the output, that you want. All the plants come in with their microbiome, so we do a natural fermentation: they’re basically ground up, and you allow them to ferment, which can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Then you centrifuge off the oil.

But we had to make sure the fermentation process was optimized, which made it a little complicated. You have to run the fermentation several times; you take a part of the ferment from the last one that went well and use that as a starter for the next one, and you keep on doing this so that you get a more well-defined mixture. If you were to do it fresh every single time, for example, you’d get much more variability from batch to batch. But this way, the ferments converge around a point so that you’ve got a stable output.

Now, I didn’t personally do this; our partner in Brazil did.

Dara: How did you both decide exactly how to focus and optimize the fermentation processes?

LARRY: That was one of those rare times in life where circumstance conspires to make things better. So we were in this one place, studying the Yanomami and seeing what they have in their world that we were missing.

Separately, our partner, who’s a neurosurgeon by training and is also a pharmacologist, started doing this fermentation work 25 years ago, before any of this data was around, really just based on her instincts.

And when we met, we discovered that the two of us were essentially looking at the same thing from two different perspectives. So we started working together about 8 or 9 years ago and have been continuing to refine and develop the oils over time.

The complexity of these oils — the products of this fermentation — is insane. You get fatty acids, triglycerides, vitamins, antioxidants. They’re biologically intact examples of the same output you see in the microbiome of the Yanomami.

Now, a substantial number of metabolic pathways are common to all of these fermented oils. But we chose plants with really interesting personality on top of that foundation.

Dara: Tell us about that personality!

LARRY: The plant that’s really front and center, that we use in a lot of the products, is Croton Eluteria, or Sanoma Leaf Oil. You’ll find Sanoma oil in The One because it’s so soothing, but it's in all of the products that you chose. This oil has a collection of molecules called terpenes that have all kinds of activity: they’re anti-inflammatory, they can be anti-microbial, some of them are neurotransmitters…it’s an entire range of functional activity. So we selected plants with really interesting activity like this. And, by the way, that rubric is continually evolving. As we learn more, it changes.

Dara: Do these oils have different textures? Is that one of the reasons why you choose a given oil for a given product?

LARRY: OK, this is really interesting. All of these oils have a pretty similar texture. Our human sebum has a specific composition of fatty acids and triglycerides, and after the fermentation processes, the fatty acid and triglyceride composition of these oils looks very much like that of human sebum. I don’t think that’s by accident. I think there was a convergence around this composition because there’s a functional overlap they’ve all been optimized for that we don’t yet understand.

Dara: That is wild. What else do you think we should know about these three products — The Renewal cleanser, The One cream, The Premise body oil — that most people don’t know?

LARRY: As far as these products are concerned, skin (whether it’s on the face or on the body) is skin: you can use these products anywhere. I think of these products as skin food. They’re replacing the function and output of a part of the microbiome that none of us have anymore.

They’re not specifically there to fix just one specific problem—wrinkles, eczema, acne—because they work more broadly: they’re restoring what we’ve lost so that skin can get its native resilience back from the time when it was optimized. 

And resilient skin is what looks better, feels better, and is less prone to those specific conditions. Because those conditions are the failure modes that less-resilient skin exhibits. We’re not treating disease; we’re restoring health, the ability to bend without breaking.

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Here's a little more about Larry, who's the real deal:
Larry Weiss, MD is a physician, scientist, and entrepreneur specializing in microbiome research and biotechnology. The founder of Symbiome and Weiss Bioscience, a microbiome research and development company, Larry was also the founding Chief Medical Officer at AOBiome and the founder of CleanWell. Larry has an MD from Stanford and a BS from Cornell in Biochemistry.