Contact with the skin is inevitable or desirable for daily life products such as cosmetics, hair dyes, perfumes, drugs, household products, industrial and agricultural products. Our skin functions as a complex physical barrier between the environment and our internal organs. The major penetration routes for these substances are via the hair shaft and stratum corneum. Many substances applied to the skin are metabolized and/or activate the immunological defense via various innate and adaptive mechanisms before entering the systemic circulation where they can influence other organs. Therefore, strict safety (hazard) assessment of actives and ingredients in products and drugs applied to the skin is essential to determine the safe concentration for human exposure. For personal care and pharmaceutical companies, skin product efficacy is also essential. Taken together, this means that skin models which closely represent human skin physiology are required for hazard assessment and product efficacy testing. In the validation of these models, molecular readouts or better markers for monitoring the viability, or even the response to external stimuli are becoming essential requirements. The application of off- or even on-line “sensing technologies” is not trivial.
Our aim is to develop the next generation human skin equivalent model, NextSkin, to test whether products which are being developed by personal care and pharmaceutical industries are safe for humans. The microfluidics organ-on-chip approach will enable incorporation of the blood vessels and therefore penetration studies into the circulation.
During this workshop, we will give you a short overview on our skin-on-chip project and demonstrate how the TissUse device is being used in the project. We will present on the techniques used to construct the skin models and the readouts used to validate the model. As an add-on, we will discuss the role and added value of “real-time” monitoring using novel technologies such as Surface Plasmon Resonance and Mass Spectrometry.
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References
- Rodrigues Neves C, Gibbs S. Progress on Reconstructed Human Skin Models for Allergy Research and Identifying Contact Sensitizers. Curr Top Microbiol Immunol. 2018 Jun 23. doi: 10.1007/82_2018_88. [Epub ahead of print]. Review.
- van den Broek LJ, Bergers LIJC, Reijnders CMA, Gibbs S.Progress and Future Prospectives in Skin-on-Chip Development with Emphasis on the use of Different Cell Types and Technical Challenges. Stem Cell Rev. 2017 Jun;13(3):418-429. doi: 10.1007/s12015-017-9737-1. Review.
- Escriba-Gerloch M, Shahbazali E, Honing M, Hessel V. Quality-In(process)line (Qulproli) process intensification for a micro-flow UV-photo synthesis enabled by online UHPLC analysis. Tetrahedron, 2018; 74: 3143-3153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tet.2018.02.016.
