Determined to return his wife’s recurring acne condition to a healthy state, Boon Chong quickly realised that using a targeted approach to manage the skin microbiome was the best solution. In fact, he went as far as to request his wife to take a sample of her acne for him to investigate the underlying bacteria in his lab (now if this isn’t true love, what is?). 

 

In following his passions, Boon Chong has never shied away from a challenge and instead adopts a mindset to think and do the unconventional. This time was no different. 

 

When his work in SMART on finding novel antimicrobials using existing technologies hit a roadblock, he was inspired to source for new, emerging methods to target harmful bacteria. During this period, he came across phage lysins- the more he read, the more they intrigued him. 

 

At that point in time, lysins were only discussed by a few groups and faced many limitations to be developed as a potential antimicrobial compound. Boon Chong leveraged his extensive scientific background and research in protein engineering to address these shortcomings and developed an effective solution against acne. 

 

This is when Maurice, a dermatologist by profession, joined Boon Chong’s mission. Maurice has always been driven by the question of “Why do my patients have what they have and how can I cure it?”. This curiosity was particularly piqued when he met a pair of brothers with Frank Ter Haar syndrome, a condition that causes severe acne. It inspired Maurice to challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding acne formation, develop a new hypothesis and test it in Singapore. And he was right! 

 

Maurice’s work led to a paradigm shift in acne development knowledge which he found to be a multi-factorial condition causing an imbalanced skin microbiome to which the next step would have been to develop a microbiome-directed intervention. This is where the timing of Boon Chong’s proposal to Maurice with his phage lysins idea was immaculate. 

They both share a passion to bring impactful technologies out of the lab and into our lives. Managing the skin microbiome is just the beginning. This novel platform technology has spurred them to think about how this targeted tool can be applied to any other microbiome. Oh the possibilities- from cosmetics to gut to therapeutics!