Automating production of a unique skin culture test model

如果需要，新的护肤品需要在开发过程中进行广泛的测试，以确定安全性、毒性和有效性。从历史上看，这就需要使用动物试验，这具有严重的伦理和经济影响。在禁止在动物身上测试化妆品及其成分方面，欧盟一直是全球领先者。在化学工业中，只有在替代品不能提供决定性结果的情况下，才会使用动物试验。制药业仍然依赖动物试验，但正在不断寻找替代方案，以减少所需的动物数量，并产生更可靠的临床前数据。目前的皮肤测试替代品有许多局限性，不能很好地与整个动物/人类数据相关联，这可能会减缓新产品的开发，增加开发成本，甚至产生误导性的临床前数据。事实上，在欧洲和美国，每年仍有多达50万只动物被用于皮肤监管测试和研究。在所有这些领域，动物测试的替代品和大幅改进的人类皮肤模型都被迫切需要。邓迪大学的衍生公司Ten Bio创造了一种创新的人类皮肤测试技术，称为TenSkin(Tm)，使用的是通常在手术后会被丢弃的皮肤(例如腹部整形手术或“腹部整形”)。身体上的皮肤处于自然的机械张力下。TenSkin(Tm)由一种方法和设备组成，可以将皮肤保持在这种优化的张力下，使皮肤保持在可存活状态的时间是竞争型号的两倍，使其适合广泛的实验室测试。这项技术的应用将减少，甚至在某些情况下，在动物和/或劣质皮肤模型上测试药物、化学和化妆品的需要。该项目的核心是设计和制作第一个同类自动TenSkin(Tm)组装平台的原型。这对于满足预期的需求水平和实现技术许可收入模式至关重要，我们已经收到了领先全球公司的兴趣。作为这一项目的结果，世界各地的制药、化学和化妆品公司将能够获得一种新的人类皮肤技术，该技术提供的数据比现有系统更能预测人体上发生的事情。从伤口愈合到对疗法的反应，使用这种基于张力的技术培养的皮肤与人体上的活体皮肤几乎没有区别，为用户提供了测试新真皮产品的最合适的系统。

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.