Featuring Alex Lorestani, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO, and Nick Ouzounov, PhD, Co-Founder & CTO, Geltor
Collagen isn’t one thing, it’s at least 28 families encompassing over 130 proteins. This episode traces how Geltor built a platform and toolkit for screening and producing distinct, bioactive collagens, including how a computational approach led them to focus on Type 21, a collagen first identified through the Human Genome Project.
Transcript
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Alex: You’ve led taking collagen from this amorphous thing to a platform and a toolkit. Could you help us understand how you pulled that off, and how we should think about collagen today?
Nick: When people think of collagen, they mostly think it’s one thing. But in reality, there are 28 families, groups of collagen that encompass about 130 proteins, in any animal body, including humans.
Within that, we decided to focus less on what’s most abundant, which is Type 1 and Type 3 collagen, and that’s been the majority focus of any collagen company out there. We decided to ask: if we set aside abundance and what’s accessible through traditional extraction methods, what are the most bioactive, bio-functional collagens out there? We took a computational mining approach, screening and checking what’s available. That’s how we focused in on Type 21 collagen, which wasn’t even identified until the Human Genome Project.
They found it in the DNA, then looked for it and found it’s really present at the baby and fetus stage. It does get expressed when you get an injury, and decreases over your life. It’s basically an extracellular matrix maintenance protein, versus a purely structural protein like Type 1 and Type 3 collagen mostly are.
Disclaimer
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This article/media is intended for general educational and informational purposes. It does not constitute medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Statements regarding specific ingredients reflect current scientific understanding and have not been evaluated by the FDA. Individual results may vary.