Empowering cosmetic raw-material innovation through synthetic biology, Hesheng Technology has earned industry-wide recognition for its technological strength.
Liu Tiangang, Founder of Hesheng Technology (first from the left), receiving the award
On November 6, 2025, Shanghai—At the grand opening of the 8th China International Import Expo (CIIE), the awards ceremony for L’Oréal’s “BIG BANG Beauty Tech Co-Creation Program” (hereinafter referred to as “BIG BANG”) took place in the Innovation Incubation Zone.
Wuhan Hesheng Technology Co., Ltd. (“Hesheng Technology”) stood out with its cutting-edge technology and forward-looking solutions in the field of synthetic biology and was named the winning company in the “Foreseeing New Research & Production” track for Mainland China!
BIG BANG is an open innovation platform initiated by L’Oréal China in 2020 and expanded to the North Asia market in 2024. It has since inspired other global markets. The platform aims to connect the global startup ecosystem and jointly shape the future of the beauty industry.
This year’s competition themed “Upgraded Innovation, Leading the Future,” attracted a record-breaking 700+ top startups and SMEs across four tracks in the North Asia region—making the competition highly intense and exceptionally valuable.
In this premier competition of beauty-tech innovation, Hesheng Technology was selected as the winner of the “Foreseeing New Research & Production” track in Mainland China. This honor represents strong recognition from leading global beauty companies and authoritative expert juries, validating Hesheng’s role as an emerging force that actively contributes to and accelerates new innovation in global beauty R&D and production models.
Winning this award marks an important milestone for Hesheng Technology. It not only demonstrates the immense potential and commercialization prospects of the company’s core technology, but also symbolizes the rise of China’s innovation capabilities in the global beauty-tech arena—showing that China is playing an increasingly pivotal role.
Hesheng Technology has been named the winning company in the “Foreseeing New Research & Production” track for Mainland China.
Hesheng Technology’s success in this competition arises from its unique technological approach. As an innovative synthetic-biology company specializing in the discovery and efficient bio-production of natural products, Hesheng was founded by Professor Liu Tiangang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is backed by an expert team of PhD researchers and professors with deep academic and industrial experience.
The company has established a complete technical system that spans natural-product discovery to efficient biosynthesis. Its core strengths are reflected in four major dimensions:
Leveraging more than ten years of natural-product research and innovative breakthroughs published in top journals such as Nature, Hesheng uses industrial-grade microbial chassis cells as its core engine, supported by high-throughput automated platforms. This enables the deep mining of natural-product “dark matter” and precise elucidation of biosynthetic pathways for rare active ingredients—surpassing the inherent limitations of traditional plant extraction and chemical synthesis.
As a deeply vertical synthetic-biology company, Hesheng focuses exclusively on the high-efficiency discovery and bio-manufacturing of natural products. With both “top-tier R&D depth” and a “startup-level agile pace,” the company achieves breakthrough source-level innovation (0→1) by engineering microbial cell factories for targeted synthesis and large-scale production of natural active ingredients.
It also ensures rapid and efficient scale-up (1→100), constructing biosynthetic pathways like building blocks, and has already achieved stable mass production at the hundred-ton scale, delivering reliable and industrial-grade supply capacity.
By using commercial-scale microbial chassis cells to “replace tens of thousands of acres of farmland with fermenters,” Hesheng breaks the bottlenecks of rare-ingredient supply and cost, and eliminates weather, origin, or agricultural-risk constraints.
This approach avoids pesticide residues and heavy-metal risks associated with plant extraction and provides high-purity and safe ingredient options—perfectly resolving the long-standing contradiction between efficacy, supply stability, and environmental sustainability.
Hesheng adopts an IP strategy focused on “independent R&D and controllable technology,” establishing a robust intellectual-property moat. The company has independently developed four types of microbial chassis and targeted metabolic systems, freeing itself from petrochemical pathways and traditional plant extraction bottlenecks.
For the beauty industry in particular, it provides differentiated active ingredients that combine sustainability, high purity, and safety.
Hesheng's strong upstream innovation capability ensures that all technologies are independently designed and developed—avoiding IP conflicts at the source while meeting the beauty industry's demand for natural, effective, and eco-friendly ingredients.
Looking to the future, Hesheng Technology will further strengthen its intelligent innovation model by entering an “AI-empowered” era.
With AI and machine learning applied to massive omics datasets, the company will:
Accelerate the discovery of natural-product “dark matter”
Reproduce rare natural ingredients with precision and efficiency
Predict, design, and optimize entirely new biosynthetic pathways
Explore new frontiers of cosmetic-ingredient innovation
Hesheng’s integrated “frontier R&D → efficient industrialization” system will continue to deliver innovative, scalable, and commercially valuable sustainable beauty-ingredient solutions—building strong differentiated competitiveness.
These AI-driven synthetic-biology ingredients are the best embodiment of the “Foreseeing New Research & Production” philosophy—pushing the boundaries of technological excellence and transforming advanced innovation into accessible, sustainable beauty experiences for everyone.
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