in-memory-of-joyce-may-hewes-dennhey
Settlers Pond, an animal rescue in Illinois, rescued several monkeys injured in animal testing. It's heartening to hear L'oreal/Maybelline are working to prevent animal cruelty.
Two of the rescued monkeys, one named Maybelline, in honor of Joyce, were taken to a primate specialist in Florida. It took months to raise funds. All they did was take various samples which resulted in massive bruising, then sedated the most injured one to take unauthorized photos.
The injured monkey, Max, was a hermaphrodite. In the lab his penis was partially torn off and his tail broken. The Vet, informed Pinky, at the Shelter, that Max needed extensive surgery but she, (the vet,) couldn't do it. Sadly Max died.
So much of Joyce Dennehy's, money was wasted. Settlers Pond, was her favorite charity. She contributed generously. She would be furious if she knew.
INSIDE L’OREAL’S PLAN TO 3-D PRINT HUMAN SKIN
L’OREAL MAKES COSMETICS AND hair color. It also makes skin. Human skin, created in a lab, so it can test its products without using people or animals. Now it’s talking about printing the stuff, using 3-D bioprinters that will spit out dollops of skin into nickel-sized petri dishes.
The idea is to produce skin more quickly and easily using what is essentially an assembly line developed with Organovo, a San Diego bioprinting company. Such a technique would allow the French cosmetics company to do more accurate testing, but it also has medical applications—particularly in burn care.
Treating severe burns typically involves grafting a healthy patch of skin taken from elsewhere on the body. But large burns present a problem. That hasresearchers at Wake Forest experimenting with a treatment method that involves applying a small number of healthy skin cells onto the injury and letting them grow organically over the wound. 3-D-bioprinted skin potentially could be produced faster, provided Organovo can successfully replicate the cell structure of human epidermis.
L’Oreal already has a massive lab in Lyon, France, to produce its patented skin, called Episkin, from incubated skin cells donated by surgery patients. The cells grow in a collagen culture before being exposed to air and UV light to mimic the effects of aging. Organovo pioneered the process of bioprinting human tissues, most notably creating a 3-D-printed liver system. Both parties benefit from the partnership: L’Oreal gets Organovo’s speed and expertise, and Organovo gets funding and access to L’Oreal’s comprehensive knowledge of skin, acquired through many years and over $1 billion in research and development.
At the moment, L’Oreal uses its epidermis samples to predict as closely as possible how human skin will react to the ingredients in its products. If L’Oreal can more quickly iterate on the molecular composition of its skin samples, it can produce more accurate results, conceivably across different skin phenotypes. That means products like sunscreen and age-defying serums—which inevitably will yield varying results across varying skin types—can be tweaked for greater efficacy.
L’Oreal also has a history of selling Episkin to other cosmetic and pharmacology companies. The company won’t disclose the going rate, but in 2011 toldBloomberg it sold half-centimeter-wide samples for €55 each (about $78 each at the time). That said, Guive Balooch, who runs L’Oreal’s in-house tech incubator, says the bioprinting will be done primarily for research purposes.
Balooch approached Organovo after seeing its human liver model. While the two companies still need to settle on an exact plan for the skin samples, the bioprinting process for epidermis will be roughly similar to that of the liver. It happens in three steps, says Michael Renard, a VP at Organovo. Once scientists have collected the human cells from the various companies that harvest and sell them, they use a proprietary in-house technology to turn the cells into a “bio-ink” that feeds into the bioprinters. The actual manufacturing isn’t all that different from what you might see with a standard 3D printer.
“In concept, it’s the same idea of programming the 3-D printer to print architecture on an X-Y-Z axis,” he says, referring to the CAD designs that typically inform 3-D printers. “We just happened to use living human cells. There’s delicacy involved.” During the last step, the structure of cells is nourished (Renard won’t say how) and kept in a temperature-controlled environment so they can fuse into a cohesive mass of tissue.
There are still a bevy of unknowns, such as when Organovo will start production and just how much faster it will be compared to L’Oreal’s current derma-farming methods. Still, Renard says Organovo produces at “a commercial scale,” so it stands to reason the same will go for skin. That’s a vague start, but these things—you know, the rapid manufacturing of human flesh—don’t happen overnight.
