The consumer is always right, so knowing what consumer panels appreciate will always be the proof of the pudding. But if you want to understand the pudding…. you need to turn to other means.
Animal free – an important challenge to embrace
For the company ROHTO Pharmaceuticals, specific products, which happens to be “pudding like” but intended for personal care, needed to be understood more deeply. In particular, they wanted to know how some specific ingredients interact with our skin because this could probably explain why consumers like some more than other. The scientists at ROHTO had read the literature and found that the technique used by CR called solid state NMR could provide these insights. Indeed, it is a very specialized method not used by many but CR scientist Enamul Mojumdar is one of the few. Enamul has done a lot of skin studies and a lot of solid-state NMR but not much is done with this technique, at least not published, using human skin.
The project we embarked upon together with ROHTO was decided from the beginning to be using human skin, not only because it is truly what we want to understand but because of the company’s dedication to refrain from the use of animals in their development.
NMR providing clear differentiation on skin fluidization
The practical work was extremely challenging and together we learned many things that we hope to be able to share in a publication or by other means so more can be able to run these animal-free studies. The challenges were however worth it, because indeed we could observe changes in how the different ingredients interacted with the skin constituents: the lipids and proteins of the stratum corneum. We noted clear differences in how much they fluidized the otherwise solid character of this barrier. This fluidization or moisturizing effect can absolutely be what the consumers feel, why one pudding is preferred over another.
This type of fluidization can also be used to increase the availability of active ingredients in the skin. In previous studies we have used this method and been able to see antagonistic effects as well as synergetic, we have been able to pin-point what pathway an ingredient is taking, and which skin constituents are affected the most. The ssNMR study in combination with TEWL or SAXS or Franz Cell permeability is a particularly strong combination to support both development, patent and marketing claims.
We are very grateful for the trust given to us by the ROHTO-Team in this explorative but yet very specific project and we wish them good luck with their future developments!
We do have an Application note on the usefulness of ssNMR to study skin!
