Automating production of a unique skin culture test model

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New skin products require extensive testing during development to determine safety, toxicity, and effectiveness, where required. Historically, this has necessitated the use of animal testing which has serious ethical and financial implications. The EU has been the global leader in the ban of testing of cosmetics and their ingredients in animals. In the chemical industry, tests on animals are only used when alternatives do not provide conclusive results. The pharmaceutical industry still relies on animal testing but is continually searching for alternatives to reduce the number of animals required and to generate more reliable pre-clinical data. Current skin testing alternatives have many limitations and do not correlate well with whole animal/human data which can slow the development of new products, increase development costs, or even generate misleading preclinical data. In fact, up to 500,000 animals are still used in Europe and the US annually for skin regulatory testing and research. In all these sectors, alternatives to animal testing and vastly improved human skin models are urgently sought.Ten Bio, a spin-out from the University of Dundee, has created an innovative human skin testing technology, called TenSkin(tm), using skin that would normally be discarded following surgical procedures (e.g. abdominoplasty or "tummy tuck"). Skin on the body resides under natural mechanical tension. TenSkin(tm) consists of a method and device that holds this skin at this optimised tension, which maintains the skin in a viable state for up to twice as long as competing models making it suitable for a wide range of lab testing. Application of this technology will reduce, and in some cases eliminate, the need for testing of pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetic products in animals and/or inferior skin models.This project is centred around the design and prototyping of a first-of-its-kind automated TenSkin(tm) assembly platform. This is essential to both meet the expected level of demand and enable a technology licensing revenue model for which we have already received interest from leading global companies. As a result of this project, pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetics companies across the world will have access to a novel human skin technology that provides data that is vastly more predictive of what happens on the body compared to existing systems. From wound healing to response to therapeutics, skin cultured using this tension-based technology behaves almost indistinguishably from living human skin on the body, offering users the most appropriate system for testing new dermal products.