The cosmetic industry’s alignment with technology and empirical science has reached a key milestone with the advent of massive sequencing techniques. This has brought a tremendous impact in cosmetic science: A new, more complete picture of the effects of cosmetic ingredients is brought in, offering answers to questions scientists had not formulated to begin with.
At Provital we make sure we put technological breakthroughs to the service of improving the quality of active ingredients and extracts that are incorporated in the current cosmetic market.
Bioimage and Bioinformatics in Cosmetics
Along with the state-of-the-art techniques and technological advances, we have worked in finding a way to ensure we have the right bioinformatic capacities for the analysis of massive data. This is where our Provital’s Bioimage and Bioinformatic Platform (PBBP) comes in.
Through this platform, we are able to obtain a data-driven approach that guides us to perform better cosmetic ingredient evaluations. This translates into new doors to new investigations opened, and major breakthroughs brought along by the use of these data-analysis and parameter-detection tools in the development of many of our CareActives™.
For instance, Provital scientist are able to perform RNA-seq sequencing experiments that consider the total of genes being expressed at one specific moment during an experiment. This massive sequencing technique is called transcriptomics and provides us with a global and cutting-edge vision of the molecular mechanisms involved in the effects of an ingredient, as it was the case of our volumizing active, Sculpup™.
On the other side, Bioimaging platforms represent the second trailblazing technology that is revolutionizing in vitro studies today, allowing scientists to perform visual tests of a plethora of intracellular mechanisms through increasingly precise technologies. Impressive advancements on High-content and live imaging technologies, Cryo-electron microscopy and Super-resolution confocal microscopy have allowed scientists to inspect skin in in-vitro experiments with an exhaustively which was unthinkable until very recently.
Provital’s Bioinformatics tool
At Provital, we are also aware of the key role collaboration plays in scientific advancements. That is why we are constantly enforcing our scientific collaboration network for beauty innovation. We currently collaborate with a massive sequencing center at the Academy of Sciences in Athens, and with one of the greatest experts in bioinformatics analysis in Europe, the bioinformatics platform of the Max Delbruck center in Berlin. Moreover, thanks to being part of what started as “the CORBEL initiative” and its interdisciplinary collaboration platform, we have received key technical advice to develop our own internal capacities.
Collaboration in Bioimaging and Bioinformatics
Moreover, Provital uses RNA-seq thanks to being part of the Euro-BioImaging, a research infrastructure that provides access to imaging technologies to users from academia and industry. And last but not least, our collaborations also involve image-quantification algorithms, which means we can extract complementary data, unknown to the naked eye, automated and 100% unbiased.
Besides, it is thanks to large cluster projects, such as the European Open Science Cloud for the Life Sciences (EOSC-Life), that researchers, both from academia and industry, connect to shared cloud resources, which will allow the sharing and re-use of data, tools, and workflows in the cloud. At Provital, we are proud to be pioneers in building such a strong relationship with international research clusters. We believe it is a crucial point when building a more science-backed industry.
All in all, the emergence of Provital’s Bioimage and Bioinformatic Platform stands out as a key tool that allows us to access full, complex analysis that observes more cell information without limiting our research to one single pathway and thus obtaining more precise and comprehensive results.
