Automated transcript

Welcome to today’s webinar entitled, Expanding ingredient into new markets and products. So these webinars really the, the result of a co collaboration between P2 Science and Creme Global to discuss today why we did it, how we did it, and the result we found during this collaboration, I’m delight, introduces you to need Burns, which is the, who is the CEO of P2 Science and John O’Brien, who is the head of the data modeling and the statistics groups at crime.

Good to be here. Hi everybody. So Neil to you first if you don’t mind, could you please just introduce your company and yourself as well? Sure. Thanks John. I’m Neil Burns, c e o of P2 Science. And the origins of the company are at for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. The two co-founders of the company are Paul nais.

He’s a professor in green chemistry and is actually quite well known in the field of chemistry as one of the originators of green chemistry. And so he formed the company with one of his students, Patrick Foley at Yale University. I got involved with them pretty early on and we pulled together some financing and got the, got the company up and running, got into our lab right at the end of 2011.

And the focus of what we do really is around green chemistry pretty simply. And we’re interested in making the most of green chemistry. Particularly cosmetics and personal care products, also fragrances. Then we have some longer term initiatives in bringing green chemistry to polymers, particularly polyamide and polyesters.

We have a manufacturing plant today in Connecticut in little town called Nauck, which is about 50 60 miles north of New York. And our headquarters and research lab are in Woodbridge, Connecticut, which is just next door to new Haven. We’re still fairly small in terms of employees, about 20 employees full-time growing up pretty rapidly.

By the end of the year, we’ll probably have 25, 26 employees. And as I mentioned, our business today focused primarily in cosmetics, personal care and fragrance. Great. Thank you, Neil. John, if you don’t mind, could you say a few words about Creme Global? Sure, certainly. So, yeah creme Global is a data science company.

We’re based in Dublin, in Ireland almost on the banks of the LiFi. Mo we’re, we are fairly broad in what we do, but a lot of our projects and products are centered around exposure. So the reason we’re here today is we have a model that looks at exposure to ingredients of cosmetics and personal care products, but we also concern ourselves in other areas.

So for example, pesticides on crops and nutrients within foods, all that kind of area. Thank you, John. So I guess we can get started. I guess the first question is for you, Neil since your company, well, is starting with I guess developing, introducing a lot of new products onto the market what are the key consideration for you into formulating or developing in new products and new brands?

Yeah. First and foremost, we, we take into account our customers needs, you know, from the very. Very initial days of the company we’ve been engaging with customers, folks like Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Procter Gamble, Henkel, Unilever, Colgate, and the large fragrance companies like Jibo, I f F, et cetera. And so we’re very much guided by what are their problems and what solutions we can bring.

By deploying green chemistry sounds pretty simple. Obviously. Problems can take many forms. They could be technical challenges, economic supply, chain related, regulatory, all these things play into you know, opportunities for product development. One of the key things. Honestly, we’ve benefited from, and is a big problem for the industry is that of silicones, the use of silicones in cosmetics and personal care products.

They, they’ve come under a lot of scrutiny in particular because of legislation in the European Union curtailing in a, in a very big way, their use that’s led to broader scrutiny across the globe and across a whole range of product. And, and, and so we were able to use our green chemistry technology to bring the customers alternatives to silicones free use in cosmetics and personal care products.

and and that’s been behind a lot of our recent growth. Our companies have taken a good look at our technology and, and trialing our products in skin and hair products, for example. And and, and, you know, we’re able to bring, to bring to the market something that’s biodegradable by renewable biocom Compat.

Which is not a silicone and, and, and so, you know, that’s, that’s all come about by really engaging pretty closely with customers to find out their pain points and, you know, see if we see if we have a solution. Thanks Neil. So probably a related question in terms more probably focusing on, on the safety and consumer safety of your products.

How much emphasis do you put on, you know safety concerns related to your product? And also why does it need to be very accurate? When you put something on the market? Yeah, sure. I mean, obviously, you know, sa , safety’s important for obvious reasons. I, I, I think it, it’s become a lot more important and, and in, in terms of a consumer metric.

You know, consumers today are much more interested in what’s in the products they buy.  And why, why is that stuff in there? You know, what’s in there and why is it in there? What does it do? This is something that I think has been an issue that’s been helped by information technology, internet.

It’s much, it’s much easier for con consumers to get a, get insights as to what’s in the product and do their own research and, you know, the consumer product companies themselves. Are responding to that, and that just ripples back through the supply chain. And so we have to be very clear about what our products are, what their function functions are, and, and what the safety profile is before we even consider going to market and, and, and talking to customers.

And so, you know, we, we’ve been, we’ve been pretty focused on that. The products that we make are. In large part built on terpenes, which are naturally occurring compounds and vegetable fatty acids. Terpenes of course present in much plant material and, and trees, and and were making naturally derived derivatives of those terpenes.

I, I, in addition to sort of understanding at a basic level, the safety profile in terms of exposure. Skin and, and hair and, and presence in the environment. It, it, it’s also important for any ingredient manufacturer to fully understand how those ingredients are being used by their customers. So our customers are, you know, folks like L’Oreal, for example, our, our consumer product companies like Procter and Gamble.

But, you know, you, you not only have to understand. They are using the product, but how their customers, right, the consumer is using the product to get a full picture of, you know, where it goes, what, what happens to it, how it’s used, how it’s stored, and its ultimate fate in the environment. I’ll go back to, you know what I said about, about silicones, which provided a great stimulus for our recent product innovations.

You know, silicones have been tagged. As persistent and bioaccumulative in the environment. Right. And, and, and, and that’s a function of how they’re used, right? And where they’re used. And so when we’re coming to market with an alternative to those types of, of products, it’s important for us to understand also how our products are used and where they’re gonna end up.

And get a really, as full of picture as we possibly can of that. And, and that I think, Is it makes for a much more powerful presentation for us when we go to the MAR and go to our customer and say like, look, this is what we got. These are our products. This is our understanding of how they’re used and where they’re gonna end up.

You know, it just makes for a much fuller sort of safety profile so that. We can say, look, the in and of themselves, this chemistry super safe. And by the way, look, this is how, this is how they’re gonna be used and this is where they end up. So it, it really completes, completes the picture from our point of view.

Great. I guess that brings us to how we met I guess it was beginning of last year when we discussed  the project and then mm-hmm. . You were looking obviously at bringing this safely on the market, but also you are missing information on new. Markets that you could also expand your ingredients to.

And this is why we ended up collaborating together because indeed our model compared to tradition technique will, will give you a worst case scenario. Our model will able to answer some of the questions you had in terms of expanding your, the use of your grid sense to new markets. So can you.

Briefly tell us what was the advantage for you as, as P2 Science to get this kind of a study done for your new Sure. Yeah, I mean, for obvious reasons. You know, it it, it helped us have a quantitative basis to talk about how, how our ingredients would be used and where they would end up as a result of their use in the consumer market.

You know, it, it, it, it gave us a, a science based. Quantitative fact-based way of talking about it. W without that sort of approach, you rely on a lot of assumptions and honestly, quite a bit of hand waving. So we like the, the statistical method that you guys had and which, you know, obviously you had, you had proved and demonstrated in prior work.

I think we, we our. Our regulatory guy, Kevin was familiar with your work in the, the, the arena of fragrances and, and, and so had extremely positive things to say about that. And so it seemed to us like, Hey, here’s a, here’s a great connotative way of really.  Being able to talk about something that we know is, is important to, important to talk about.

So that was what that’s what, that’s what attracted us for, for sure. Thanks. Thanks, Neil. So maybe John if you could just maybe, and, and if few words explain what the model is and how we came about probably within the industry to, to, to create this model over the last, I guess, five. Sure. Yeah. So I think Neil has already touched on it.

Really the important element is really the data. The calculation or the formula if you like, is actually quite simple. There’s a handful of, of of terms that go into it, depending on precisely what it is that you’re calculating. But among the most important would be how often consumers are using the product and how much of the products they’re using and what’s the concentration.

The material of interest in that product. And most of those, certainly for amount and frequency, that’s something we have very good data on. So we have very good data on from 40,000 subjects of their kind of daily use of various kind of household products, cosmetics, personal care products, air care, all that kind of thing.

Also from amounts used we have very high quality. We found very high quality and indeed took part. Some very high quality publications that studied well. How much, when people use shampoo, how much do they actually use? When people use body lotion, how much do they actually use? So we have really top, top quality data from there.

And that then combined with concentration data, which in, in the area of fragrances we have from cooperation with an organization called Rhythm, we have really very high quality data there. Or as in the case with P2 science. They may supply, our client may supply the data to us, and we can combine all of those without getting into too much, into the nitty gritty of it.

The model is a probabilistic model. So instead of putting in one single number into your equation, you try and capture the range of variety in that data. So, as we said earlier about shampoo, not everybody uses the same amount of shampoo. So if you’re calculating exposure in a population, you need to be able to capture.

That is between this number and that number, and what is the spreading between those. And we use a method called Montecarlo simulation for that. And that together, really the skeleton of the model is the 42,000 subject diaries. And together with those we can use probabilistic techniques for dropping in not just a single number on each iteration, but a number sampled from the.

The probabilistic data that we have available and that allows us then with high confidence. To give very good exposures of es estimates of exposure about your partner to the material that we’re interested in. So, thank John. In terms of the specific project with P2 science, how did you and your team and also the model help P2 science interview finding out they could safely introduce these new ingredients into markets?

I guess that, you know, traditional techniques and exposure techniques couldn’t really. . Mm-hmm. . So the first step really was to discuss the products that P2 were interested in. So we have a list of, I think it’s 72 products at last count that the model covers. So we had a bit of discussion about, well, what products did they feel that this ingredient was likely to be used in?

And once we had settled on that, then the next discussion.  what they felt were likely concentrations to that that would be used for each of these products. So once we had that data, it was fairly straightforward to then run the model and we were able to go back and say, based on these concentrations and these products, here are the various statistics.

So the 95th percentile is usually the, the most interesting, but also we had means minimums, maximum. All the ones you’d expect of exposure in the population that you’re interested in? We have, we have a kind of a second model. So obviously it’s of interest to know, well, how far can we go with concentrations?

Ordinarily we use something called an optimization model, and what that does is it kind of iterates over various possible concentrations and it will give you the kind of highest that you can safely. In each of your products. In the case of P2 though they had a pretty good feel for how high concentrations were likely to go.

So in this case, we opted for the root of just dropping in those maximum values that they thought they would use and double checking that the exposure that came out of the other end was within safe limits. And that was indeed. Thank you John. So Neil, in terms of impact after this study, obviously you, you, you had the you could safely introduce these new these new ingredients maybe in two markets you didn’t know.

What was the real impact then on P2 science and the new horizon. You could then visit now with It, it validated our business plan. I think it was one more quantitative validation of our business plan because you know, John, as I said, the, these, these compounds are unique to us, patented quite a breakthrough, and we saw potential for these CI polls to become standard ingredients in a, a lot of end products.

In the same way that today silicons are standard ingredients in a lot of end products. You know, you look at the back of a bottle. Any, any hair care or skincare product, and you read the ingredients, right? Silicones are in there. They’re everywhere. And and, and, and, you know, they’re actually pretty good.

You know, they, they deliver shine and lubricity and ency and moisturization and moisture protection. So they’re in there for a good reason. As I mentioned, now they’re under scrutiny by a lot of, a lot of companies in a lot of.  and, and so, you know, we, we saw an opportunity for our products to become the new standard ingredient, if you like, in, in the same range.

And so it was, it was important for us to say, okay, given that, you know, we’re gonna be everywhere that silicones are, let’s say, and maybe more besides. , what, what does that mean for, for exposure? What does that mean for the environment and, and the consumer? And, and let’s have a good, you know, quantitative understanding of that.

Because, you know, when this stuff takes off, it’s really gonna take off. I mean, it’s really gonna take over. And so having this data, having this analysis done, having this information put together, Validated our plan, that that’s, that’s, yeah, we’re gonna go after this entire market and, and become a, a standard ingredient in much the, the same way that, that, that silicones are.

So I think it’s good that we did this right up front. I mean, as I said, we had our, we had the inherent safety data with respect to things like skin sensitivity irritation, potential, and of course biodegradability. All that was left in. One piece of the puzzle we needed to also put in place related to, you know, the, the, the fate of the, the product in the consumer market.

And that’s, that’s what this work enabled us to do. So, yeah, it was had, had a, had a substantial impact and it was very, very positive. Thank you Neil. So I guess this is the start of the journey. Where do you see this going? Do you really see silicone being replaced in the long, medium term? So, yeah, I don’t think I’ll win any prizes for predicting that silicones will be replaced eventually one way or another.

They’re already under enough scrutiny right now. Will our products replace silicones? Yeah, I think that. Ultimately, we’re poised to get a good chunk of that market. As I said, the uptake of our products already has been extremely encouraging. We’ve got literally thousands of samples under evaluation.

We’ve got hundreds of companies buying our products today, and, and, and so, you know, for a lot of technical reasons, for a lot of performance reasons and, and safety reasons and environmental reasons. You know, these are, these are great alternatives. So we’re, we’re, we’re quite encouraged by that. I, I think though it’s important to point out, at least from our point of view, that, you know, we’re not just a, a, a sort of a silicone alternative company, and, and nor are we necessarily demonizing silicones.

We’re, we’re responding to a market need, we’re responding to consumer interest. That’s come back to us via the consumer companies, and as I said, bring in green c. Solutions to those problems. And so you know, I think for, for, for those reasons we’re, we’re, it’s looking like we’re gonna be quite successful.

So we’ll knock on wood, hope it keeps going. Thanks Neil. Maybe one quick question then for John, cuz we still have a bit of time. In terms of innovation or maybe a innovation roadmap on the model, do you have new features and functionality or new data sets that you’re planning to introduce into the model in the, in the next few months?

We recently finished a round of updating the model, so we added the adolescent age. So for people from 12 to 17, before that we had only 18 years old enough. Mm-hmm. , we added household care products, which weren’t previously in the model, and we expanded our diary data to cover two new.

European countries. So Italy and Poland were added into it. Currently, we’ve no concrete plans. And together with our partners with them, we’re very interested in, in expanding the geographic scope of the model. So Asia is an obvious target, but of course Asia is huge. So it’s a question of where we will start with that.

Yeah, so that’s, that Those are the plans for the immediate future for the. Well, thank you John. I think this con concludes our, our session for today. So thanks very much Neil for joining us today for this webinar. Win our you’re welcome. Thank you. Thanks a lot, John, for joining. Thanks, Neil, the explanation.

Thanks Talking with you. . Yeah, likewise. Good stuff guys. Much success to you guys. Thank same to you. Thank to you. So if you have any questions or need more information, you can go directly to the P2 science website, so P2 science.com or to the Creme global website, Cremeglobal.com, and you’ll find all information about use case could also what P2 Science do and what Crime Global will do.

So thank you very much and see you next time. All right. All the best cheer. Yeah.