About
Geraint Thomas
Biochemist writing on skin barrier biology, regulation, and repair. Founder of Geraint Thomas Bio. Author of The Damaged Skin Barrier.
Education
MBiochem · First Class
Institution
Based
Cardiff
Platform
Founded Sep 2025
Introduction
I’m a biochemist, and I write about skin through the lens of mechanism, regulation, and biological stress. The short version is that I wrote The Damaged Skin Barrier because it was the book I was looking for when my own skin became reactive, unstable, and impossible to manage, and I couldn’t find it. The longer version is that the book is one expression of a wider interest in how biological systems hold themselves together, and what happens when they can’t.
My academic background has taught me to look past the symptom and try to understand what the system is actually doing. That’s the habit the book is built around, and it’s the habit that runs through everything on the platform. Skin is one system. It happens to be the one I currently know best. It isn’t the last.
I built geraintthomasbio.com to give this work a home. Science-led writing, no product framing, no affiliate relationships. An independent platform for people who want to understand the biology before they’re told what to buy.
Research grounding
Where the scientific habit comes from.
The questions that shape the book are older than the book iteslf. They come from the research training that sits underneath everything on this platform.
I graduated from Cardiff University with a First-Class Honours and Master of Biochemistry. My academic work was research-based, and it centred on apoptotic signalling and the biological processes that determine how tissues respond to stress, repair damage, and maintain structural integrity.
My main research examined the role of tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) in breast cancer stem cells. Using both an in vitro pharmacological and molecular approach, I investigated how TNF-family signalling regulates cellular survival pathways and apoptotic resistance. By pairing functional phenotypic assays with post-transcriptional gene silencing (RNAi), I examined whether a novel therapeutic compound could disrupt these pathways and sensitise stem-like populations to TRAIL-mediated apoptosis.
Earlier research explored epigenetic and genetic influences in prenatal depression, examining how early biological stressors may predispose offspring to disease later in life. This was taking from a bioinformatic approach.
Those projects sit outside dermatology. The questions they were built around do not.
The Questions that Carry Through
How do cells respond to pressure? What determines whether a system repairs or destabilises? Why do small regulatory shifts produce disproportionately large downstream effects?
The skin barrier is not separate from those principles. It is another biological system governed by signalling thresholds, structural integrity, enzymatic timing, and feedback control. Barrier failure is regulatory biology under strain, and once you look at it that way, it stops being a skincare problem and starts being a mechanism problem.
That framing is the throughline. It’s what the book is built on, it’s what the articles are built on, and it’s what anything I write next will be built on.
The platform
Why I built this, and what it's for.
Geraint Thomas Bio is an independent platform for mechanism-first writing on skin barrier biology. I built it because most of what reaches a general reader on this subject is product-led, mechanism-light, and structured around routines rather than understanding. The biology exists. The primary literature is there. It’s just scattered across papers that most people will never open, written in a language that doesn’t translate easily.
The platform is built to do that translation. Articles are grounded in primary research, carry no product recommendations, and explain the regulatory and structural logic that makes the skin behave the way it does. The first major output is The Damaged Skin Barrier, a mechanism-first book on barrier damage and repair. The writing archive is building out alongside it, and a fully cited references page sits behind both.
I built the platform myself. The writing, the research, the site, the content architecture, the digital execution. My day job in web operations gave me the practical foundation to do that cleanly rather than handing it off. For me, the build is part of the same project as the writing: a way of translating complex biology into something a reader can actually reach, without the usual scaffolding of product promotion getting in the way.
Current focus
What I'm working on now.
The platform’s scope is broader than the book. These are the active areas of work on and beyond it.
Focus / 01
Current focus · Published work
Skin barrier biology and regulation
Structure, lipid biochemistry, pH dynamics, TEWL, hard water, and the regulatory systems that determine how the barrier holds up under pressure. The core subject of The Damaged Skin Barrier and the baseline of most writing currently on the platform.
Focus / 02
Active writing · Forthcoming work
Critical appraisal of ingredients and emerging therapies
Applying the same filter the book builds: mechanism, compatibility, and biological readiness, to novel actives, procedures, peptides, exosomes, and the rest of the innovation pipeline. Increasingly the subject of the more technical writing on the platform, and the likely shape of a future book.
Focus / 03
Academic grounding · Forthcoming work
Inflammation, immune signalling, and genetics
The biological systems that sit alongside and extend the mechanisms explored in my MBiochem research on TNFα and TRAIL-mediated apoptosis, and the genetics that ran through my earlier academic work. These topics were deliberately held at surface depth in the first book because they deserve dedicated treatment. The likely subjects of further books.
Conversations
Open to conversations, not to pitches.
This work exists in a small and genuinely interesting area, and I believe some of the most useful thinking tends to happen with a simple conversation with other people working near it.
If you’re a researcher, writer, editor, clinician, or someone thinking carefully about science communication, consumer health education, or the regulatory side of skin and barrier biology, and you’d like to talk, I’m happy to connect via email.
Topics I'm open to talk about
- Science communication and consumer health education
- Barrier biology, reactive skin, and intervention biology
- Translating primary literature for a general readership
- The structure and ethics of independent science platforms
- Inflammation and regulatory biology more broadly
Direct:
Credentials
Formal qualifications and research history.
Education
MBiochem, First Class
Research
European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute
Earlier Research
Prenatal stress and offspring disease risk
Platform
Founder, Geraint Thomas Bio
Independence
No product partnerships