Cellworks Group Inc., a proteomics-driven therapy design company, and ISP Personal Care, a global supplier of advanced personal care ingredients, have formed an alliance to use sophisticated computer modelling techniques to develop and demonstrate novel skin care approaches based on ISP’s Vincience line of biofunctional ingredients.
In a recently concluded study, Cellworks Group’s Virtual Skin platform was used to model the effects in two biofunctional ingredient projects that were under evaluation for effects on skin pigmentation. The study was able to assay hundreds of bio-molecules, examining different application rates and allowing ISP to predict their effects on different skin types – before the need for expensive clinical testing. Laboratory work by ISP was able to validate the accuracy of the results produced via Cellworks Group’s Virtual Skin platform. This study was the first in a series of collaborations between the two companies that will also include work on anti-ageing compounds and synergies between different biofunctional ingredients. The alliance is an outgrowth of ISP Personal Care’s recently announced Avant Institute for developing scientific and commercial innovation for the personal care industry. According to Dr Claude Dal Farra, vice president of research and development for ISP, Cellworks Group’s Virtual Cells technology has the potential to dramatically speed up the discovery and development of biofunctional ingredients, to improve the targeting and efficacy of those ingredients, and to deliver important data to skin care companies for use in their own product development processes. “The ability of the Cellworks Group’s Virtual Skin platform to perform complex experiments with easy setup and to analyse hundreds of bio-molecules and skin attributes gives us unprecedented insight into the workings of biofunctionals we have under development,” he said. “We’ve been closely working with the Cellworks Group to validate the predictive power of their technology and were very impressed with the accuracy of their system and the ease of interacting with the technology. Working with their virtual skin platform in order to model the interaction of the melanocyte, keratinocyte and fibroblast is a tremendous advantage as the co-culture equivalent would require primary cell lines that only last 48 hours at best, imposing high costs and extreme time pressures. This technology has the ability to improve the productivity of our scientists and enable us to get better products to market in a shorter time,” he added. Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins, particularly their structures and functions. After genomics, proteomics is often considered the next step in the study of biological systems. It is significantly more complicated than genomics, because, while an organism’s genome is more or less constant, the proteome differs from cell to cell and from time to time. This means that even the basic set of proteins that are produced in a cell needs to be determined. Scientists are interested in proteomics because it gives a much better understanding of an organism and more holistic knowledge than genomics alone can provide. Cellworks technology merges reductionist proteomics data and clinical trend information.
