ResVita Bio’s founder designed experiments to kill his own startup. Here’s how it led to the company’s success.

By Chrissa Olson.

If it crumbled under pressure, it had to go.

That was the mindset Amin Zargar, founder of ResVita Bio, had when he spent the Covid-19 lockdown developing his start-up. As both an engineer and an entrepreneur, what mattered to him was understanding his patient base and developing a technology that worked.

Over the course of six months of stress-testing the science and business, he killed three versions of the company because the engineering wouldn’t work, or the market wasn’t there. What he came out with was a robust business model and product supported by millions of dollars in investment & grants.

ResVita Bio is developing skin disease treatments through topical genetically engineered bacteria that deliver continuous protein therapy, hardwiring each protein to the needs of the disease they seek to treat – particularly Netherton Syndrome and eczema. Both are skin disorders characterized by chronic skin inflammation – but Netherton Syndrome in particular is fatal for 20% of children.

“A lot of first time founders start their company from what they were working on from their PhD or postdoc, so there is this sunk-cost fallacy of, ‘I’ve worked on this, so it has to be ‘worth’ something commercially,’” Amin says. “To me it didn’t have to be ‘worth’ anything. … It was the years of experience that had the value, not the idea. For a startup, I was trying to find an idea worth all my years of experience.”

Even though he’s progressed through several versions of the technology, the one thing he hasn’t changed is his dedication. He’s been working towards this for a long time, since his childhood.

“My mother had rheumatoid arthritis,” Amin says. “It was really bad. At that time, the medication was terrible. It was really painful for her, so she’d say I’d grow up and fix her. That was always the thing in my head – I always wanted to do therapies.”

ResVita Bio started in a basement. In 2020, Amin was a postdoc in Jay Keasling’s lab at LBNL, studying how to use polyketide synthases to produce specialty biofuels and commodity chemicals. In March of that year, before Covid-19 shut down the world, he hustled his undergraduate students to finish their experiments for his final academic publications (15 first-author publications in all). Then, he started nucleating what would become ResVita in his basement apartment in Emeryville.

For six months, it was just him, a computer, and a whiteboard. (Amin loves a whiteboard. He still has several.) With the world shut down, he could email National Academy of Science members, and they’d actually reply. What could have been a meeting months later was now tomorrow at 2.

ResVita Bio almost never happened – he worked for five years with the goal of becoming an academic, but Keasling, a legend in synthetic biology and his eventual co-founder, whose research has helped launch 12 companies, pushed him to consider a start-up.

The turning point came when Amin was offered a faculty position – but he was realizing he could have the seeds of something transformative. He performed a test: If the bacteria in the moisturizer survived his own skin for eight hours, he’d pursue the company. And it did.

Funny enough, six months later, the formula actually didn’t work with a different moisturizer formulation. Had he used it earlier, he would have been an academic.

Before becoming a tenant at Bakar Bio Labs in 2022, he and Keasling had joined the Bakar Fellows program in 2021. The program supports faculty, postdocs, and graduate students at UC Berkeley who want to take the leap into the world of entrepreneurship. It provides resources, including funding and mentorship, that allow academics to investigate the business potential of their projects, with the ultimate goal of turning research into reality.

A year later, they got started with pre-seed funding, primarily from angel investors, but also from the Berkeley Catalyst Fund and the Berkeley Frontier Fund, before joining Bakar Bio Labs.

Now, they’ve also obtained $2.7 million more in funding from NIH, as well as follow-on venture capital.

They’ve gotten far – but to Amin, it doesn’t feel like he’s quite there. To him, success only looks like FDA approval. They’re about 18 months away from efficacy data in humans, and 3-4 years from FDA approval.

“This is the advice I give to a lot of founders: Your time is the most valuable thing in the universe,” Amin says. “If I get you ten million dollars to work on something that is going to fail, and force you to work on that thing, you should say no. You want to kill it if you can, because you only have so much time.”