Biossance

A San Francisco biotech company was engineering sugarcane yeast to produce malaria drug precursors. A by-product of that engineering became one of the cleanest moisturizing molecules in skincare. They spun out a brand to sell it. Amiris was founded in 2003 as a biotech spinout from UC Berkeley, focused on synthetic biology, fermenting modified yeast to produce complex molecules that were otherwise rare or expensive in nature. A parallel program engineered yeast to produce squalane, a moisturizing molecule traditionally harvested from shark livers. In 2016, Amiris launched BioSants as a consumer skincare brand built around that lab-grown squalane, avoiding both shark-derived material and the less-refined olive squalane, commonly used in mass-market competitors. BioSants' commercial story is the vertically integrated ingredient.