The Voices Building India’s Biocosmetics Future
In conversations across laboratories, boardrooms, and clinical practices, the scientists, founders, and officials shaping India’s biocosmetics landscape share a striking convergence of conviction: that biology, rigorously applied and ethically grounded, is the most consequential tool available to the beauty industry — and that India is uniquely positioned to lead its application.
Every significant scientific and industrial transformation has its voices — the researchers who saw the possibility before the infrastructure existed, the entrepreneurs who built commercial bridges across the gap between laboratory and market, the clinicians who translated molecular evidence into patient benefit, and the regulatory architects who shaped the governance frameworks within which innovation could responsibly flourish. India’s biocosmetics revolution has all of these voices, and listening to them carefully reveals not only where the sector has come from but where, with deliberate collective effort, it is heading.
The following conversations — drawn from interviews and public statements by leading figures across the biocosmetics value chain — offer a composite portrait of an ecosystem that is simultaneously confident in its scientific foundations, clear-eyed about its remaining challenges, and ambitious about its global aspirations. These are the people who are, day by day, building the India that will be a frontrunner in sustainable, scientific beauty by the end of this decade.
Dr. Ezhil Subbian, Co-Founder, String Bio:
‘Fermentation Will Be to the 21st Century What Agriculture Was to the Last Ten Thousand Years’
Dr. Ezhil Subbian speaks about fermentation technology with the conviction of someone who has spent years watching an idea move from the category of promising hypothesis to validated industrial reality. As co-founder of String Bio — the Bengaluru-based company that converts methane into high-performance personal care proteins — she has been at the forefront of what she describes as a fundamental reimagining of where industrial raw materials come from.
‘The question we have to ask ourselves as an industry is this: what kind of supply chains do we want to build for the next century?’ Dr. Subbian has argued in multiple public forums. ‘Agriculture has served humanity extraordinarily well, but it is running up against absolute limits — of arable land, of fresh water, of biodiversity carrying capacity, of climate tolerance. Fermentation offers us a manufacturing paradigm that can operate almost independently of those constraints. You can ferment in a city. You can ferment using waste streams. You can ferment in three acres what would take five thousand acres of soy cultivation to produce. And you can do it with full traceability, full quality control, and zero animal welfare burden.’
For the personal care sector specifically, Dr. Subbian identifies what she calls the ‘localisation dividend’ of fermentation-based ingredient manufacturing — the ability for countries and even regions to produce premium actives from locally available feedstocks rather than importing them from geographically concentrated global supply chains. In India’s context, this means that the country’s abundant agricultural waste — crop residues, biogas plant outputs, industrial methane emissions — can serve as the raw material for a sovereign ingredient manufacturing capability that reduces import dependency and creates skilled manufacturing employment in the bioeconomy sector.
‘We are not just making peptides,’ she has said. ‘We are demonstrating a model of industrial biology that can be applied across dozens of ingredient categories. If India embraces this model — if our research institutions, our startups, our government, and our brands commit to building fermentation-based ingredient supply chains — we will not just be a market for global beauty. We will be a source of it.’
“You can ferment in three acres what would take five thousand acres of soy cultivation to produce — with full traceability, full quality control, and zero animal welfare burden.” — Dr. Ezhil Subbian, String Bio
B.N. Manohar, CEO, Stempeutics Research:
‘Regulatory Rigour Is Not a Barrier — It Is a Brand’
When B.N. Manohar describes the journey that led Stempeutics Research to becoming the only Indian company with DCGI-approved bio-cosmetic products derived from adult stem cells, he does not dwell on the scientific achievement — remarkable as it is. He dwells on the regulatory journey, because it is there, he believes, that the real competitive moat of science-led biocosmetics is built.
‘When we went to the DCGI with our Stempeucare™ range, we went with a complete clinical dossier,’ Manohar has explained in industry forums. ‘We had conducted human volunteer studies. We had extensive stability data. We had characterised our secretome — we knew what was in it, at what concentrations, and what those compounds do biologically. That level of documentation is not standard in the cosmetics industry. It is standard in the drug industry. And that is precisely why our approval means something that no ordinary cosmetic licence can mean.’
Manohar’s perspective on the relationship between regulatory rigour and commercial credibility is instructive for the wider Indian biocosmetics sector. In a market where consumer trust in ingredient claims is a decisive purchasing driver, the ability to point to a DCGI approval — granted only after extensive safety and efficacy documentation — is a form of brand equity that marketing budgets alone cannot purchase. It is the difference between a claim and a certification, between a brand promise and a regulatory finding.
He is also candid about the challenges. ‘Stem cell biology is inherently complex. Biological variability between donors is a real scientific challenge. Our pooling technology — combining secretome from multiple screened donors — is our answer to that challenge, but it required years of development and validation. Small companies entering the biocosmetics space need to understand that the regulatory path for novel biological actives is long and resource-intensive. The rewards, in terms of product differentiation and consumer trust, are commensurate — but the investment required is real and should not be underestimated.’
On the question of India’s global positioning in stem cell-derived biocosmetics, Manohar is measured but optimistic. ‘India has world-class stem cell research capability. We have the clinical infrastructure. We have the regulatory framework, however demanding. What we need now is sustained investment — from venture capital, from strategic corporate partners, from government programmes — that allows science-led companies to complete the long journey from laboratory to licensed product without running out of runway before they cross the finish line.’
Dr. Sapana Kamlani, Dermatologist:
‘The Patient in 2026 Knows More Than the Patient in 2016 — and That Is Entirely a Good Thing’
Dr. Sapana Kamlani practices dermatology in Mumbai, and she occupies an interesting vantage point in the biocosmetics conversation: she sees, daily, the gap between what consumers believe a product will do and what it actually does to their skin. For much of her career, that gap was wide and consistently in the direction of over-promise. She believes it is now, for the first time in her professional experience, beginning to close.
‘My patients in 2026 come to me with their phones,’ she says. ‘They have read the clinical abstract on PubMed. They know what hyaluronic acid molecular weight means for penetration. They know the difference between a cosmetic that films the surface and one that actually reaches the dermis. A decade ago, I was educating patients about ingredients. Now I am often having peer-level conversations with them about the science of their own skin. That shift — from passive consumer to active participant — is one of the most significant changes I have seen in twenty years of practice.’
Dr. Kamlani is a proponent of biotech-derived actives for her patients, particularly those with compromised barrier function, post-procedural skin, or chronic inflammatory conditions. Her clinical reasoning is direct: ‘Lab-grown actives give me confidence that the concentration in the product matches the concentration on the label. With botanical extracts, I am never entirely certain what I am prescribing in terms of dose. With fermented niacinamide at 10% or recombinant EGF at a validated concentration, I know exactly what I am putting on my patient’s skin, and I can predict — with reasonable scientific confidence — what it will do. That certainty matters in a clinical context.’
Looking ahead to what she predicts will be the defining skincare shift of the next five years, Dr. Kamlani points to personalised biocosmetics — the use of genomic, microbiome, and skin imaging data to tailor formulations to individual biological profiles — as the frontier that will most dramatically reshape her practice. ‘The era of one product for one demographic is ending. What is coming — and I believe it will arrive within this decade — is formulation personalisation powered by biological data. Biotech is the engine that makes that possible. India, with its extraordinary genomic diversity and its expanding AI and biotech capabilities, is extraordinarily well-positioned to lead this next chapter.’
Dr. Madhuri Agarwal, Dermatologist & Aesthetic Medicine Specialist:
‘Purity Is Efficacy’
Dr. Madhuri Agarwal brings to the biocosmetics conversation a dual perspective that is relatively rare: she is both a practising dermatologist and an active participant in the aesthetic medicine ecosystem, which gives her visibility into both the mass-market consumer experience and the high-end clinical skincare space where biocosmetic ingredients are most intensively deployed.
Her central argument about the efficacy of lab-grown actives is deceptively simple: purity is efficacy. ‘When people ask me whether biotech skincare is better than natural skincare, I ask them a question in return: better at what? If better means a more appealing origin story, perhaps natural wins. But if better means more reliably doing what the label says it does — more consistently, at a lower risk of adverse reaction, at a higher degree of clinical confidence — then lab-grown wins, essentially every time.’
Dr. Agarwal points to the entourage-effect problem as the fundamental limitation of complex botanical extracts in clinical use. ‘A traditionally sourced rosehip extract might contain 60% vitamin C in optimal conditions, or 20% in a batch from a different season or origin. A lab-grown ascorbic acid at 10% is 10% — every batch, every time. For a practitioner prescribing to a patient with post-acne hyperpigmentation, that consistency difference is not an academic point. It is the difference between a predictable clinical outcome and an unpredictable one.’
She is also attentive to the regulatory dimension of the efficacy conversation. The CDSCO’s 2025 guidelines on borderline products, she argues, will accelerate the shift toward biocosmetics by holding all efficacy claims to a higher evidentiary standard. ‘The companies that will lose under those guidelines are the ones whose claims were never backed by real science. The companies that will win are the ones who were already doing the science. And overwhelmingly, those are the biotech-led companies.’
Rashmi Kumari
