ArrowBiome develops technology to kill specific bacteria in humans

The Singapore startup focuses on the personal care market but may expand to gut health soon.

ArrowBiome has pioneered selective bacterial targeting and killing in humans to help treat diseases including skin conditions caused by bacteria such as acne and body odour, to promote gut health, and ultimately to tackle antimicrobial resistance.

“[When it comes to] skin microbiomes, people add more stuff to the microbiome as a solution like prebiotics, probiotics, or postbiotics,” Boon Chong Goh, founder and CEO at ArrowBiome, told Singapore Business Review. “At ArrowBiome, we do the opposite. We remove the harmful elements instead of adding more and [our] one-of-a-kind technology enables us to do that.”

The Singapore startup’s technology works with an antibacterial protein called lysin, which was relatively underexplored when Goh started developing this technology six years ago.

Goh noted that lysin kills bacteria very quickly, — within 10 minutes — and eliminates more than 90% of the bacteria, “essentially popping them like a balloon.” It is also highly selective, targeting only the bacteria you want to kill.

“And third, bacteria have a hard time developing resistance to lysin,” Goh said.

"Our antibacterial proteins are highly selective and effective,” he said. “We're looking at a dosage of just 0.01%, which is, frankly, mind-blowing. When you compare that to something like benzoyl peroxide, which is used at concentrations of 5-10%, 0.01% is almost unheard of.”

“It's extremely safe, requiring only a small amount,” he added.

These proteins are safe and won’t cause skin drying or irritation and are sustainably produced using synthetic biology, Goh said.

“[Our] technology can be a promising alternative to antibiotics, and we can also use that to solve the global unmet medical need of AMR (antimicrobial resistance), [which will have] caused 10 million deaths by 2050 if there was no intervention,” he said.

Antimicrobial resistance could lead to an additional $1.3t (US$1t) in healthcare costs by 2050, according to World Bank estimates.

The biotechnology startup, founded in 2022, currently focuses on the personal care market, where its ingredients can deliver immediate benefits to consumers. This includes skincare and deodorant products.

They create customised proteins for business-to-business suppliers in the cosmeceutical — cosmetic products with bioactive ingredients purported to have medical benefits — space. These proteins are used as the active ingredient in the products these manufacturers make.

“We supply to ingredient manufacturers and specialty chemical companies, who can then do some formulation for their own products or provide them to others who create their own brand,” Goh said.

ArrowBiome is personal to Goh. After witnessing his wife’s lifelong struggle with recurring acne, he decided to boost his research and create a solution that would make a difference.

‘Ambitious plan’
“When I was developing this antibacterial technology, I discovered that acne is linked to a specific bacterial species called cutibacterium acnes,” he said. “Then I asked myself, ‘Why don't I develop a solution that can specifically target that bacteria and maybe, in the end, benefit my own wife?’”

Goh has an extensive background in biophysics, which he used to develop this technology six years ago. But because his expertise is more on the technical side, he needed practical knowledge in dermatology. 

This led him to meet his co-founder Maurice van Steensel, a professor of dermatology and skin biology at Nanyang Technological University. “We matured the technology to a point where there's substantial commercial interest. This is where we decide to spin off into ArrowBiome,” Goh said.

The personal care market has served as a stepping stone for their entry into the broader therapeutics space. “We will rapidly expand into other microbiome focus areas, including the gut microbiome, and ultimately, we want to address critical challenges such as antimicrobial resistance,” he said.

The startup also plans to build a robust intellectual property portfolio that fully captures the value of its ingredients, platform, and capabilities.

“Everybody has an ambitious plan to scale capabilities across multiple applications and we aim to bring new and impactful solutions to consumers who face issues based on their microbiome,” Go said. “We are actively scaling our capabilities to bring these products to consumers all over the world and to develop new ones for additional indications.”