In this interview Dr. Carolina Reis explains OneSkin’s mission to harness scientific research for healthier skin aging and overall systemic health. She describes how the skin’s barrier weakens with age, releasing inflammatory signals that can exacerbate chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. To address this, OneSkin uses human‑derived skin tissue models—avoiding animal testing—to evaluate anti‑aging products. By measuring DNA methylation‑based epigenetic clocks, they can quantify the biological age of lab‑grown skin and assess whether a product truly reverses aging at the cellular level, rather than merely providing a cosmetic, temporary effect. Reis outlines the role of accumulated DNA damage and senescent cells, which secrete inflammatory factors that spread dysfunction throughout tissue. Their product aims to boost DNA repair, preventing senescence and improving skin from within. A clinical study will treat participants for 6‑12 months, with biopsies taken to measure changes in skin biological age. She also shares a forward‑looking vision of preventive therapies started in the 30s‑40s to stave off age‑related disease, and reflects on her personal motivation to leave a lasting, service‑oriented impact.
Chapters
Our mission is really how we can use science to empower people to be doing things that they love at whatever age. Because this is such a large organ, even low levels of inflammation that are being produced by our skin can significantly impact our body's level of inflammation. As we age, our skin barrier weakens, and this causes the release of inflammatory signals to our body. And this can contribute to chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. If you want to develop a drug and if you want to test cardiotoxicity, it's much more reliable that you're testing a human cardiomyocyte than you're testing rats or dogs. And this is much more effective. The cosmetic industry was being pushed by the population to really ban animal testing and we could basically offer human skins to this industry to test their products. We saw, for example, this anti-aging market really booming. It's a massive market, but consumers are still lost, right? Which products work, which don't? So how we can help validating the efficacy of those products? If we can measure the age of the tissues that we grow in the lab, then we can test a product, and then we can see if that product is changing the age of that tissue. And we know that we can do that by reading the DNA. So, you know, the methylation, the epigenetic profile of our tissues and our cells, they are correlated with chronological age, and they are the best marker to let you know an intervention is working on the cellular and molecular level. All of these are anti-aging products, but they are not really targeting aging. They are trying to make your skin to look better. They are trying to give you like a temporary solution, but they are not addressing the main cause of aging. And on the other hand, we saw so much going on on the longevity field, and a lot of companies is starting to really target those underlying mechanisms. And we thought, why no one is doing something on that area related, applied to the skin? Age is nothing more than the accumulation of damage in our cells and our tissues. So we are constantly exposed to different types of stress and damage. When we are younger, we are able to repair that damage or we are able to basically eliminate the cells that are not functioning well. When we grow older, we lose a little bit of that efficiency in terms of DNA repair. And these aged or damaged cells, also called senescent cells, they start to build up in our tissues. The problem when they build up in our tissues is that they start secreting inflammatory signals that basically induce other cells around that are healthy to become senescent. This inflammation that starts to spread in our tissue leads to tissue dysfunction that is associated also with several age-related diseases. What we are inducing is our cells' ability to repair the damage caused by the UV radiation. So you don't get to form the senescent cells because your cells were, you know, efficient, making sure that we repair that damage. The product works by penetrating to your skin, helping your skin to be more effective and changing the makeup of the skin from within. So we are even running a clinical study. The participants, they will be using our product for 6 months to 1 year. And at the end of 6 months, we will collect the biopsy and we can see, we can measure in humans how much we are, you know, changing the biological age of the skin. So this will be something very unique for, you know, this industry and this market. And we are very excited about that. I see that in the future there will be a push, you know, for us to develop therapies that we start like taking after, you know, 30s, 40s, when we are still in good health. So we don't need to get to our 60s and 70s with, you know, several detrimental diseases. I know where I wanna leave my mark in the world, you know, where I can contribute more, and I felt that this was, you know, the best opportunity that I had. So I didn't think twice. I really acknowledge all the challenges and everyone that made my life harder because they made me a better and stronger person. I think to me, if we dedicate our lives to serve others, I think we will be the most successful person that we can be.
