Scaled up Microfluidic Screening of Skin Care Ingredients Using Multilayer Skin Spheroids

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Development of multicomponent skin care products is a time-, labor- and cost-intensive task that begins from the identification of a promising individual active ingredient (AI) and continues to the optimization of formulations by using animal models. Experiments on animal models are expensive, time-consuming, and require special skills. Furthermore, due to the ethical considerations, the use of animal models for testing cosmetic ingredients is banned by many countries, including Canadian S-214 "The Cruelty Free Cosmetics Act" that prohibits the sale of cosmetics tried on animals. Therefore, the utilization of reliable in vitro skin models such as multicellular spheroids/organoids is highly recommended and favored. Over the past two years, in collaboration with BASF Corporation, the PI group has designed and developed a microfluidic (MF) platform to grow massive arrays of skin spheroids from human dermal fibroblasts. In the case study, the utility of this MF platform was demonstrated for high-throughput screening of the effect of vitamin C on protein production by fibroblast spheroids. The current one-year proposed research project aims at (i) extending this simplistic skin model by replacing of fibroblast spheroids with fibroblast-keratinocyte spheroids to better replicate an epidermal/dermal skin structure and (ii) designing and developing a new mode of operation of the MF platform that would enable scaled up user-friendly throughput screening of multiple AIs and their combinations. The development of this skin spheroid-on-a-chip platform is a vital step toward time-, cost- and labor-effective manufacturing in the cosmetic and skin care fields, with a potential application in the area of pharmaceuticals, which are of strategic importance for Canada.