Dr Pragya Sharma left everything familiar behind to build Granlab in Belfast, a steroid-free skincare and dermatology company driven by science, love, and the memory of watching her grandmother suffer for years with no solution in sight.
It's a story that involves a debilitating skin condition, years of failed treatments, a relocation to a city Pragya had never imagined calling home, a bumpy visa journey, and enough late nights to fill a small novel.
But that is the thing about Pragya’s story. It just also happens to be one of the most quietly extraordinary journeys we have come across.
It Started With Gran
Granlab is not just a clever name - the “Gran” is literal, and short for grandmother. Specifically, Pragya’s grandmother back in India, who had suffered with debilitating psoriasis for years. No treatment worked well. Nothing stuck. And watching a loved one live in that kind of daily discomfort, year after year, with no real solution in sight, that stays with you.
Pragya, with her background in structural biochemistry, decided she was going to do something about it. She started researching and formulating. Her business journey had begun, in a way, back in 2018, long before there was a company or a product line or a lab. There was just a scientist who loved her grandmother and refused to accept that nothing could be done.
After six months of using Pragya’s creation, her grandmother was symptom-free.
‘It was like magic,’ says Pragya. ‘Only better. It was science.’
Pragya's relationship with her grandmother had not always been straightforward. But building this treatment together, watching it work, gave them something to share. Now they are inseparable. And that, more than any patent application or clinical study, feels like the real heart of what Granlab is.
Choosing Belfast
Pragya made a deliberate choice to bring her business to Belfast and to Northern Ireland. The early days were genuinely difficult. The language, even in English, took adjustment. The accent, the mannerisms, the unspoken ways that people communicate in Northern Ireland all required time and patience to understand.
She chose to stay, and she chose to build here deliberately, because she wants to pave the way for other women in Northern Ireland. Not as a side ambition but as part of the whole point of what she is doing.
The Science That Actually Does Something
Granlab officially launched on 27th March 2024, but the science behind it had been years in the making. The company operates on what it calls a steroid-free by design philosophy. Its flagship formulation, GL-1, is an investigational topical treatment being developed for chronic inflammatory skin conditions including psoriasis and eczema, conditions that affect nearly a billion people worldwide according to the WHO.
The research and development involved independent safety testing, in-vitro studies in partnership with the Centre of Applied Bioscience Research, multiple patents and clinical studies. This is a project built by someone who spent an arduous year working as a patent attorney in 2022 specifically to understand the intellectual property landscape she was operating in.
Alongside the R&D sits SkinSettle, a consumer skincare range designed for sensitive and reactive skin. This is a product that is accessible, gentle, and formulated for all skin tones and types - because Pragya understands that not everyone can wait for the clinical trial results. Some people need help with their skin right now, which is where this product addresses a gap in the market.
Building The Clearing
One of the things that makes Pragya’s approach distinctive is that she has never believed science alone is enough. She launched The Clearing, Northern Ireland’s first community and support network for people with chronic skin diseases, because she knows that living with a visible, ongoing condition is as emotionally exhausting as it is physically uncomfortable.
Skin conditions carry stigma. They affect confidence in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has not lived it. They make people feel isolated and misunderstood in environments that have no framework for what they are going through. Pragya has watched this up close for years, and The Clearing exists because she decided that the community support needed to exist as much as the formulation did.
Building the Team
Granlab employs a team that works in both the lab and the office, and Pragya is clear that remote working is not part of the model. The nature of the work, and the ethos of the company, requires people to be present.
Hiring has been one of the more complicated parts of building the business. Job vacancies often attract more applications than the team can work through, but the quality of many of those applications has become a real concern. The majority, Pragya says, show clear signs of having been written by AI tools. The passion is gone. The individuality has been stripped out. In a sector where trust is everything and the work is deeply personal, she cannot hire based on a perfectly structured application that tells her nothing about who the person actually is or why the role matters to them.
She wishes she could respond personally to every unsuccessful application with honest feedback. The volume makes that impossible, which is its own kind of frustration for someone who leads with care.
The Lessons Behind the Business
Pragya spent a significant amount of time in Granlab’s early stages securing funding and investment, and she is honest about how much she learned through that process. Finding the right people, connecting with them, getting them on board. Understanding which investors understood the vision and which were simply interested in a transaction.
One of the most valuable things she took from those years was learning to separate herself as a person from her business. Just because she was having a hard day did not mean Granlab was. And the reverse is equally true. That distinction, simple to state and genuinely difficult to live, changed how she operates as a founder.
What Drives Her
Pragya talks about her ‘why’ the way people do when it is genuinely non-negotiable. She is building Granlab to mean something beyond its products. Something that helps people. Something that changes the quiet resignation Pragya saw in tenants, in patients, in people who simply did not know they had options.
For now, she is focused on the newsletter she is building, the products in development, the community she is creating, and the women in Northern Ireland she wants to help find their footing in a place that does not always make it easy.
At the centre of all of it, still, is her grandmother. Symptom-free. Beaming. The woman who made it all make sense.
Find out more about Dr Pragya Sharma and Granlab at granlab.co
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