Mitra Bio

Mitra Bio is a London-based biotechnology company that has developed the world's first non-invasive skin epigenetic testing platform, enabling skincare, pharmaceutical, and longevity medicine companies to measure biological skin ageing directly from living human tissue for the first time. Founded in 2020 by Dr Shakiba Kaveh and Dr Cristiana Banila, the company was built around a fundamental problem in the skincare industry: the tools available to test whether a product actually works at the cellular level were either invasive (biopsies costing over £2,000 per sample), conducted on artificial skin models, or based on animal testing — none of which accurately reflect the complexity of human skin ageing in vivo.

Mitra Bio's solution is a proprietary tape-stripping technique that collects viable epigenetic material from the surface of human skin painlessly and without ethics approval delays, combined with next-generation DNA methylation sequencing and data science to extract biomarkers of biological ageing, inflammation, UV damage, and treatment response. The platform's MitraClock — the world's first skin-specific epigenetic aging clock — quantifies how fast a person's skin is biologically ageing, validated across more than 400 samples and published in the British Journal of Dermatology. This makes Mitra Bio's platform the only technology capable of measuring the actual molecular impact of a skincare formulation on skin age at cellular level, in real human tissue, at commercial scale.

The company has conducted over 10 clinical trials with global skincare companies, completed a melanoma screening collaboration with Guy's Hospital, and built a growing biobank of skin epigenetic data spanning multiple ethnicities — addressing a significant gap in the industry, where most trials have historically been conducted on white skin. Mitra Bio raised £4.7 million to scale its platform into pharmaceutical, aesthetics, and longevity medicine markets, pursuing the founders' conviction that skin ageing is a disease to be measured, understood, and ultimately reversed — not simply managed.