● Our story
There are easier things to do (or sell).
We’re Sam Thomas and Lindy Firstenberg, and we could have launched a sunscreen. Or another serum built around whatever ingredient is having its moment, in a beautiful box. The shelf always has room for one more. Instead we took on one of the hardest problems in skin, and we decided to solve it the hard way. This is our story.
01 – The shift
Beauty to bioscience.
Lindy has spent years inside beauty, health and wellness, and she has a word for where it’s all heading: pharma-fication. It means the things we put on our skin every day are starting to be held to the standard we used to reserve for medicine. That means a real active ingredient, a mechanism someone can actually explain, and evidence you can go and check for yourself.
She has a name for the people driving it, too. She calls them the “Consumer PhD.” They read the ingredient list before they read the label, and they go looking for the study behind the claim. Most of them have tried enough products to know a promise from a result, so ornate packaging, padded ingredient lists and borrowed science don’t work on them, or for them.
We think that’s good news. It’s the standard this industry should have been meeting all along. We’d like to help reset the standard for beauty, and we don’t believe the answer is in beauty at all. It’s in bioscience.
02 – The protein
Then we met the scientists.
Three PhDs at Tec de Monterrey, along with the business partner who backed them, had spent thirteen years working on a single protein. MRJP1 occurs naturally in royal jelly. They learned to make it on its own, as a recombinant protein, and took it all the way from human skin cells in the lab to severe wounds in hospitals and clinics.
Between the two of us, we’d been shown a lot of ingredients over the years. This was the first one that made us both stop. What the science didn’t have was a way to reach the people who could use it every day. That became our job, and the idea the company was built on.
03 – Why scar?
We started where it’s hardest.
We gave ourselves one objective: take a bioengineered protein for dermal repair and point it at the most stubborn problem in that field, which is the scar.
For Lindy, this is personal.
She spent four years as the case no one could explain. Nine hospitals. Twenty-three doctors. She said goodbye to her family twice, and both times she stayed.
Her scar isn’t from the illness. It’s from the cure. For a long time it was raised and angry, and she has chosen to keep it.
“It’s the receipt. Proof that I was here, and proof that I survived.”
What stayed with her was how little anyone is offered when they’d rather not keep theirs. There were plenty of promises and almost no evidence. Every scar is different, and what to do about one should be up to the person who carries it. For most people, that choice has barely existed.
Sam’s reason is more stubborn. He runs the company, and if you’ve watched our explainer video, his is the voice walking you through the science. Early on he put it plainly: you only get to launch once, so you’d better do it right. Scar is the problem we chose to work on first because we do the hard thing the right way. In practice, that means more testing than a company our size would normally take on, and taking responsibility for doing that work properly. It’s difficult by design.
04 – How we work
Our ethos is repair science, consumer accessible.
We work in the space between the laboratory and the bathroom shelf. Serious science, made easy to use.
05 – The name
We named the company after the molecule.
MRJP1 isn’t a name somebody dreamed up in a branding session. Any sane brand person would tell you it’s a crazy name for a brand. Ours did. It’s the protein itself, and we put it on the bottle because the product is the point.
06 – What we believe
Truth over promise.
Repair over illusion.
Science over story.
Advancing the science of repair.
© 2026 MRJP1 Labs.
