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 has researchers 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 told Bloomberg 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.

The French cosmetics giant has partnered bioprinting startup Organovo to figure out how to 3D print living, breathing derma that can be used to test products for toxicity and efficacy.
“We’re the first beauty company Organovo has worked with,” says Guive Balooch, global vice president of L’Oreal’s tech incubator.
The firm is already growing more than 100,000 skin samples annually, but under the current method, skin samples are grown from tissues donated by plastic surgery patients in France are then cut into thin slices and broken down into cells.
With San Diego-based Organovo’s help, L’Oreal aims to speed up and automate skin production within the next five years.
Research for the project will take place in Organovo’s labs and L’Oreal’s new California research center. L’Oreal will provide skin expertise and all the initial funding, while Organovo, which is already working with such companies as Merck to print liver and kidney tissues, will provide the technology.
Organovo has already made headlines with claims that it can 3D-print a human liver but this is its first tie-up with the cosmetics industry.
Its statement explaining the advantage of printing skin, offered little detail: “Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced in vitro methods for evaluating product safety and performance, but the potential for where this new field of technology and research can take us is boundless.”
It also gave no timeframe for when printed samples would be available, saying it was in “early stage research”.
However, printed skin has more value in a medical scenario, potentially creating stores of spare skins for burn victims.