Cultivating relationships

As you head southward from Paris on a regional train, it takes you just under one hour to reach the small station “Le Bras de Fer.” When you get off the train here, you are greeted by billboard-sized photos of laboratory scenes announcing the Genopole biotechnology park, which is within walking distance. Sixty-five companies are based there, one of which is Abolis. Founders Valérie Brunel and Cyrille Pauthenier receive visitors in their office. “It’s still quite sparse here,” apologizes Pauthenier, “We only rented this wing a few weeks ago.”

Abolis can accelerate the research and development of innovative biomanufacturing and microbiome solutions thanks to the investment of an international consortium last July that includes, among others, BOLD, L’Oréal’s Corporate venture capital fund, the DeepTech & Climate Fund, and Evonik Venture Capital.

Sustainability in the cosmetics sector is about much more than just CO₂ emissions. In order to make shampoo, make-up, and skincare products more resource-efficient and environmentally friendly, manufacturers need to consider the selection of raw materials and the way the products are formulated as well as how they are used in the consumer’s bathroom. The cosmetics industry is committed to improving its entire value chain by addressing multiple key areas. These include issues such as the conversion of environmentally valuable land, the type of cultivation, and fair working conditions in agriculture. 

The efficient use of raw materials in the production of cosmetics is just as important as the biodegradability of the cosmetic products themselves. Through innovative eco-design principles, manufacturers are striving to optimize product usage by consumers, reducing packaging material and energy consumption.

The sustainability of cosmetic products plays an important role for more and more consumers. The analysis company Straits Research estimated the volume of the market for biobased cosmetic and personal care ingredients at more than 5.2 billion US dollars in 2023. It is expected to rise to more than 8.6 billion US dollars by 2032. “The legal requirements have become stricter and our customers are also increasingly selecting ingredients based on environmental criteria,” confirms Satzinger. “For several years, Evonik has been using targeted enzymes to produce cosmetic oils in order to make a significant contribution to reducing emissions from cosmetics. At first, only a few customers wanted them. Today, they are in high demand.” Most of the ingredients for cosmetics that Evonik produces are now biodegradable, says Satzinger. “New products must meet this criterion from the outset.” 

Further progress might now be achieved by a collaboration between Abolis, Evonik, and L’Oréal. The three partners want to produce ingredients using biotechnology in the future. Satzinger explains how this cooperation will work: “If L’Oréal needs an ingredient for a product, Abolis will develop its biotechnological solution in the laboratory. If the process works on a small scale, Evonik will take it over and transfer it to larger systems for industrial production.”

The founders of Abolis are well-versed in the biobased production of molecules: Valérie Brunel, 54, is a chemist and expert in innovation management, while Cyrille Pauthenier, 36, is a chemist and biologist. “We met in 2013, when Cyrille was an ambitious young researcher with an entrepreneurial spirit and Abolis was nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation,” says Brunel. The fact that Abolis joined the Genopole research campus made the start easier: “In the beginning, we only had a workbench, an office, and a set of pipettes. We were able to borrow a lot of the super-expensive equipment we needed here,” says Brunel.

In the first ten years, says Brunel, they only raised one million euros, “which is not much for a biotech-company.” The State, which supports young French companies, provided startup assistance in the form of grants. “But we had sales right from the start and managed to run the company with as few expenses as possible.” The fact that they could lease equipment also helped. The first collaborations with large companies, such as pharma group Servier, cheese manufacturer Bel, food group Lesaffre and, in 2019, L’Oréal, were established after just a few years.

But there is a long way to go before the yeasts produce what they are supposed to. It begins in the computer science and modeling department at Abolis. Here, engineers develop sequencing software, maintain the databases, control the robots in the laboratory and back up the genome data. The experts have to keep an eye on all kinds of imponderables, such as ensuring that the yeasts do not poison themselves with the product they are making. If Abolis considers the production of a substance by a strain to be feasible, employees in the laboratory implement what the IT experts have previously worked out.

Flasks with blue lids and clear yellowish liquid circle in shaking incubators, centrifuge tubes are arranged in an orderly fashion on the workbenches, and plates with culture media are stacked next to them. An employee in a white coat and gloves carefully pipettes a clear liquid into small reaction vessels with plastic lids. It looks like a classical biotechnology laboratory. “The difference is in these tubes,” says Abolis co-founder Pauthenier, pointing to the liquid in the reaction vessels.

Next comes a room kept at a constant temperature of 19 degrees Celsius. Several high-throughput mass spectrometers analyze samples simultaneously, and an automatic pipetting and sample processing station does its work. “This is where it’s decided whether a yeast strain created in the laboratory is good enough to be taken further in our fermentation process,” explains Pauthenier.

One floor down, three robots stand in a light-flooded room: One of these robots can completely automatically dilute up to 96 samples simultaneously—much faster and more precisely than a human. A second one isolates and purifies DNA. It can handle up to 600 samples in one working day and uses very little disposable material such as pipette tips. Finally, the third robot is specialized in distributing reagents onto plates, among other things. “You can buy a few robots quickly,” says Pauthenier. “But programming them so that they run as they should takes years.” It’s a task that the IT experts at Abolis are taking on.

One of these experts is working on his laptop next to the latest device: Behind a glass pane, a gripper arm moves reagent vials back and forth. The device costs around 350,000 euros and is intended to categorize yeast strains in the future. Pauthenier sees robotics and artificial intelligence as a valuable addition to his team’s skills, no more and no less. “They cannot replace human creativity and intuition,” he says.

Guillaume Climeau, Head of Business Development and Alliance Management at L’Oréal R&I, also has high hopes for the cooperation: “Abolis has the biotechnological expertise, we are familiar with the formulation and the consumers, and Evonik has unique expertise in the industrialization of the processes developed by Abolis.” The Beauty group is expanding its portfolio with biobased ingredients and is confident of achieving results more quickly through new forms of collaboration. “Whenever we jointly build something in a creative encounter, one plus one plus one equals more than three,” says Climeau (read also the interview).

“Simply throwing the results over the fence when one side is finished doesn’t work. We are in contact with Abolis from the outset in order to identify at an early stage which steps need to be taken to optimize the manufacturing process,” explains Thomas Satzinger. At Evonik, the choice of manufacturing location depends on the desired product—but one important location is certainly the biotech hub in Slovenská Ľupča, Slovakia, with its decades of experience in fermentation and the downstream purification process.

It won’t be long before the first L’Oréal products containing biotechnologically produced molecules from Abolis and Evonik will be on the shelves of retailers worldwide. “I would expect to see the first successes of our collaboration in a few years,” says Satzinger. Abolis founder Cyrille Pauthenier is looking forward to this: “It’s very meaningful to do something that is scientifically exciting and challenging, that is economically and socially useful, and that also helps the environment. From a global perspective, we may only be a small stone, but even small stones can set big things in motion.”