A recent study has shown that Integumen PLC’s (LON:SKIN) Labskin technology can help cosmetic companies reduce development time, clinical errors and costs.
Researchers took swabs of skin from the cheeks of 16 healthy volunteers and then cloned them into 54 Labskin subjects.
The live bacteria, virus and fungi on those subjects was sustained for up to 14 days at the company’s laboratory in York.
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The Labskin AI virtual model then analysed this microbiome data, which showed that all of the test subjects were within a range of 10% of the human volunteers’ control skin.
Bosses said the results of the study, which will be presented later today at a conference in California, validated Labskin’s ability to test multiple skincare products in parallel, without losing their original characteristics.
“This allows multiple skincare products or topical drug samples to be tested on the same subject, at the same time, thus substantially reducing development time, clinical error and clinical trial supervision costs.”
Chief executive Gerry Brandon added: “By de-risking each stage of the traditional topical drug and skincare product development process, the Labskin cloning service makes it economic for industry to research and explore new treatments by allowing agile development and a cost-effective ‘fast fail’ protocols on disposable human-skin test subjects cloned from healthy human volunteers.
“This breakthrough study clearly supports our commercial strategy and demonstrates Labskin's ability to deliver healthy and damaged skin testing 'as services' using a proven 'software as a service' business model already adopted by, and proven, in other industries.”
Integumen shares were up 1.3% to 2.0p on Thursday morning.