14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, cosmetics giant L'Oreal announced plans to get into the business of 3D printing human skin. The ambitious endeavor is the result of a collaboration with bioengineering company Organovo, which specializes in designing and creating living, fully functional tissues.
When announcing its partnership with Organovo, the French beauty company detailed that the laboratory-made human skin would serve to test its products before finally getting around to neatly packaging and marketing them.
In its younger days, the cosmetics industry would test new products on animals. In the aftermath of protests and campaigns organized by animal rights activists, however, many companies had to find alternatives. In 1989, L'Oreal stopped testing its emerging products on animals.
Come 2013, the company went the extra mile and announced that it would neither delegate this task to others. Currently, L'Oreal only consents to testing cosmetics on animals if and when regulatory authorities ask that this be done.
Having put its animal testing days behind it, the beauty company must now find new ways to make sure that its products are perfectly safe before making them available to consumers. Hence its decision to strike a deal with the bioengineering experts at Organovo.
L'Oreal already tests products on lab-made tissue samples
Although it has not yet had the chance to work with 3D printed human skin, the cosmetics giant is no stranger to testing products on human tissue samples. The thing is that these samples that it currently employs are grown from skin donated by plastic surgeons.
L'Oreal expects that, by turning to 3D printed skin instead, it will get the tissue samples that its needs to put its new cosmetics to the test faster, maybe even at a cheaper cost.
For now, it is unclear how long the cosmetics giant expects its collaboration with Organovo will last and when exactly the beauty company will begin using 3D printed human skin. What's undeniable is that L'Oreal is quite excited about this collaboration.
“Our partnership will not only bring about new advances in vitro methods for evaluating product safety and performance, but the potential for where this new field of technology and research can take us is boundless,” said Guive Balooch, global vice president of L'Oreal's Technology Incubator.
So far, Organovo has only produced 3D printed tissues mimicking the anatomy and the physiology of real ones for pharmaceutical companies and medical research centers. Its deal with L'Oreal marks the company's official debut in the beauty industry.
How does one engineer functional 3D tissues?
Scientists working with Organova explain that, before actually going ahead and 3D printing the desired samples, a design that includes all the hallmarks of a specific type of tissue must be created.
Once completed, this design is fed into a so-called bioprinter that uses it as a set of guidelines allowing it to generate one tissue sample or another, the bioengineering experts further detail.
The bioprinters used by Organova create synthetic tissues from the very same building blocks that comprise actual living human cells. Consequently, the resulting samples bear a striking resemblance to native tissue.
“Inert hydrogel components may be utilized as supports, as tissues are built up vertically to achieve three-dimensionality, or as fillers to create channels or void spaces within tissues to mimic features of native tissue,” the company explains.
If you have a couple of minutes to spare and happen to be in the mood to learn more about how human tissues can be 3D printed, have a look at the video below.
