3D Printed Skin is Coming Soon
Although this sounds like something from Silence of the Lambs, bear with us. The French cosmetics giant L’Oréal recently announced a partnership with the 3D bioprinting company Organovo to create — wait for it — 3D printed human skin. We know, it sounds fascinating (and also a little creepy) but here’s why this could be genius.
L’Oréal needs human skin in order to test cosmetics for safety and efficacy — and using farmed skin avoids animal testing. Bloomberg Business reports that the beauty brand has been farming skin since the 1980s in Lyon, France, where a lab the size of three Olympic swimming pools grows and analyzes human tissue. So where do they get the skin? It’s donated from French plastic surgery patients, and then sliced thinly and broken down into cells.
And how exactly is skin farmed? According to Bloomberg Business, the cells are placed in trays, fed a special diet, and exposed to biological signals that mimic those of actual skin. Guive Balooch, the global vice president of L’Oréal’s tech incubator, told Bloomberg, “We create an environment that’s as close as possible to being inside someone’s body.” He added that it takes about a week for the skin samples to form, as they are grown in layers.
About 60 scientists work at the lab and grow 100,000 skin samples a year — which translates into 54 square feet, or roughly the same size as a cowhide, according to the report. L’Oréal uses about half the farmed skin for testing, and sells the remainder to pharmaceutical companies and other cosmetics firms. Samples are available in a wide range of ethnicities and ages and each sample is about half a square centimeter wide and up to one millimeter thick.
But this process could all change and become faster, as earlier this month L’Oréal announced a partnership with San Diego-based Organovo to figure out how to 3D print living skin for testing products. Organovo is currently working with pharmaceutical giant Merck to print liver and kidney tissues. The two companies plan to automate and speed up the production of human skin, and L’Oréal is the first cosmetics company that Organovo has partnered with. L'Oréal will provide the skin expertise and the initial funding, while Organovo is providing the technology.
“L’Oréal is always looking for new innovative ways to expand our methods for testing the safety and efficacy of our products,” says Balooch. “Our Technology Incubator is driven by collaborations with emerging companies, entrepreneurs, and experts in a diverse array of fields, so once we saw the groundbreaking work that Organovo was doing in 3-D bioprinting, we were excited about the potential of working together to develop a new method of printing skin tissue for advanced research at L’Oréal.”
Organovo’s founder and CEO Keith Murphy explained the 3D skin printing process this way: “It’s like playing with Legos, when you are building up the layers,” he said. “We are putting the right skin cells into the right order.” Murphy explained that the 3D printing process is more effective than growing skin in a petri dish, as that method only creates 1-2 layers of cells while 3D printing creates about 20 cell layers, so it more closely resembles human skin. Although the current process does not replicate human skin exactly, Murphy says they’re working on it.
The implications of 3D printing on the beauty industry are huge.
“Testing products on skin is more accurate than testing them on a collagen and cell sample, and with real skin, you can show activity happening,” says Murphy. For example, testing a new self tanner on skin allows scientist to see the results unfold more accurately — but beyond self tanner, the possibilities are infinite.
“Organovo has broken new ground with 3-D bioprinting, an area that complements L'Oreal’s pioneering work in the research and application of reconstructed skin for the past 30 years,” said Balooch in a statement. “Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced 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.”
If human skin can be replicated quickly and on a large scale, the possibilities are endless. “Organovo has broken new ground with 3-D bioprinting, an area that complements L'Oréal’s pioneering work in the research and application of reconstructed skin for the past 30 years,” says Balooch, in a statement. “Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced 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.”
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