HIGH-TECH COSMETIC TESTING
The 4th Industrial Revolution: Innovation in High-Tech Products
Today, the focus on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence has inaugurated the 4th Industrial Revolution. Applied to cosmetics, the 4th Industrial Revolution has implied the harnessing of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to develop a new generation of high-tech cosmetic experiments: a new age that understands the human body in a deeper and more exhaustive manner.
As a result of these tech-based innovations, cosmetic science is advancing towards apprehending the skin’s behavior on a cellular and even at a molecular level, as well as generating more comprehensive and ethical testing. Consequently, scientists are presented with advanced tools to create more effective cosmetic treatments that clearly depart from previous efforts and push cosmetic possibilities to new levels in terms of efficacy claims and mechanisms of action.
Provital’s high tech products and new techniques:
At Provital, we are committed to push our ingredients’ efficacy to the maximum. This commitment comes hand in hand with guaranteeing we remain trusted leaders in research and development processes. Thanks to our expanding in-house In Vitro laboratory, we make use of the most cutting-edge testing and analysis methods. When we detect a certain procedure that can potentially provide new value in our advancements, we direct our investments to acquire the independence to perform it in-house.
This allows us to deeply analyze the skin in new ways and align the new cutting-edge techniques to our research goals.
This has meant acting on many fronts:
• Progress towards advanced human skin equivalent models and ground-breaking gene expression technologies like transcriptomics. In order to do so, we have approached the topic from two perspectives: internal training with continuous learning programs and external collaborations with relevant, leading third-party companies.
• Publishing Provital’s research in peer-reviewed journals such as:
- M Perez-Aso, A Roca, J Bosch, B Martínez-Teipel. (2019) Striae reconstructed, a full thickness skin model that recapitulates the pathology behind stretch marks. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31069805/
• An ongoing focus on collateral knowledge needed for expanded in vitro capacities such as super-resolution confocal microscopy, high-throughput microscopy, proteomics, in-house gene expression arrays, high-throughput measurements and the algorithms that help us have access to quantitative information from cellular images.
For instance, we have expanded our in-house capacities and included high-throughput fluorescent microscopy, which has allowed us to multiply the conditions we test. As an additional benefit, we also worked on developing the image analysis tools that help us analyze and process these experiments.
• Acquiring analysis capacities in Big Data thanks to being involved in internal training programs and external collaborations with renown research centers in Berlin, Athens and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
New lab for optimized high-tech product experimentation
Finally, in the pursued of our strategic goal of acquiring independence, we strongly invested in the development of 3D skin models reconstructed from scratch in our own laboratories, so that we are able to fine-tune our needs together with notably decreasing costs, and the development of laboratories stands at the heart of this endeavor.
This is why our premises have been expanded: while our headquarters’ laboratory continues its activity, as of 2014, Provital added a new laboratory location at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in UAB’s pharmacology department.
This brand-new spot has meant we now have access to a number of significant opportunities:
• An optimization of our cellular culture area. At this location, we set up experiments with different cell lines and cell models.
• The performance of an increasing number of tests, access to core facilities including cutting-edge and state-of-the-art equipment (confocal and electron microscopies), expand our working lab space, and establish collaborations with academics.
