Biotechnology: an innovative and sustainable future for household and personal care

FIRST – WHAT IS BIOTECHNOLOGY?

“Biotechnology is a broad area of biology, involving the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make products. Depending on the tools and applications, it often overlaps with related scientific fields.” – Wikipedia

My name is Dr. Barbara Paldus, and I am honored to share some thoughts about the future of biotechnology in household and personal care. I have worked in biotechnology and its applications since 2005, when I founded Finesse Solutions, that became a top global supplier of bio-processing automation solutions for cell culture, vaccine manufacturing and personal cell therapy. Finesse Solutions was acquired in 2017 by Thermo Fisher and then I founded Codex Labs in 2018, in order to pursue the use of biotechnology-manufactured actives for dermo-cosmetics focused on skin conditions such as acne, eczema, psoriasis and rosacea.

ACTIVE INGREDIENTS MADE WITH BIOTECHNOLOGY

Biotech ingredients are developed with specific functions in mind, and their large molecules are optimized to deliver performance. The materials can be manufactured at industrial scale to produce high-tech, cleaner, effective actives. We can also analyze the plant cell bio-actives to craft unique, potent, new ingredients, or create delivery systems for known ingredients to penetrate the skin barrier, like a topical drug product.

The production of biotech ingredients is also more sustainable because:

• production is concentrated (less water, energy used)
• the ingredients are more potent (lower volumes needed)

Examples of Biotech Actives and Manufacturers

At Codex we try to use biotech-based ingredient wherever possible. Some examples of biotech successes in cosmetics include:

• EMD’s Ronacare Ectoine made with glucose feedstock from renewable sources using natural Halomonas elongate bacteria from the China South Sea that are continuously re-used in fermentation. There is no process more efficient than continuous fermentation.
• Genomatica’s Brontide Natural Butylene Glycol made from renewable corn or wheat sugars that are fermented into butylene glycol. This biotech process has a carbon footprint that is more than 50% smaller than conventional processes.
• Kojic acid made using fermentation involving multiple species of Aspergillus fungi. The fungus is grown in a nutrient-rich medium in a bioreactor whose temperature, pH and oxygen concentration are controlled. Kojic acid is the end product from a series of complex biosynthetic pathways with several enzymatic reactions. Kojic acid is mostly manufactured in Asia (60% of global supply) at key suppliers such as Sansho Seiyaku, Xi’an Hao-xuan Bio-tech Co, Hubei Artec Biotechnology Co, Syder, or Hubei Xinxinjiali Bio-tech.
• K18PEPTIDE™ bonding agent by K18 hair. It is a high-performance biotech ingredient developed using computational models to mimic human hair molecular structure, so that the peptide is recognized as “natural” by the hair which allows it to repair broken or damaged hair without being washed away by water or shampoo.
• Companies such as Mibelle, Arcaea, and InnovaBio that design many supporting plant-based actives manufactured using biotechnology. Because of their higher potency, formulators can use up to 10 times less of an ingredient.

Advantages of Biotech over Naturally Extracted Plant-based Ingredients

Natural extracts from plants using classical methods (oil infusion, water infusion, CO2 extraction, etc.) have been widely used in skincare products for topical application, but the extraction is very inefficient. Most of the plant is discarded, and the concentration of active is not very high. This is why biotech-based, plant cell active ingredients are the “next generation” of “natural” products, but manufactured with modern biotechnology methods, called cell culture in a bioreactor, which usually achieve stronger activities than the plant extracts obtained by the classical methods. For this reason, companies are moving from wild-harvested plants to biotech-manufactured actives having the same functionality because there can be an overall carbon footprint reduction of up to 80% and minimal land usage.

Simply put, biotechnology can provide more highly concentrated bio-actives into a formulation thereby increasing the efficacy of a skincare product. This concentration can be up to 100X times from a typical natural extract. This can be done in a highly sustainable, reproducible way, to produce much cleaner, well-characterized products. And the entire supply chain can be monitored with real data, because process parameters (pH, temperature, viability, etc) are monitored during cGMP production.

Challenges in Biotech Ingredient Pricing

Costs are a concern as the development and scale-up of biotech-based ingredients is very costly. Some companies, like Innova Biotech, Naolys and Mibelle already have plant cell-based products ready to purchase, but any new plant cell requires at least a $500K investment, so it needs to be a highly effective ingredient that enables next level product performance, or a large-scale ingredient like squalene where the volumes of production eventually lead to an affordable price.

The main pitfall I see here is start-up companies, who are usually the early technology adopters, might not be able to afford such ingredients. But with adoption by large companies and greater volumes, costs will eventually come down, and companies providing these services will become more adept at developing new cells at a lower cost. Squalane is an excellent example of this over the last decade.

Additional Consumer Benefits of Biotech Ingredients

I only see advantages to the consumer. In contrast to the classically extracted plant-based ingredients, the extracts obtained from plant cell cultures can be easily standardized, reproducibly manufactured, and made perfectly compliant with strict safety requirements. Plant cell extracts can be made free from pathogens, pesticides, industrial chemical pollutants, allergens, and any other toxic substances, because they are produced under controlled, cleanroom conditions, complying with the procedures of good manufacturing practice. In fact, ISO 22716 manufacturing could then be applied not only to formulation manufacturing but to ingredient production as well, a huge step forward for the cosmetics industry.

Future Biotech Actives: Recombinant Proteins

I see advances coming in cell culture for production of recombinant proteins for next generation skincare products. I would expect these technology platforms to emerge in the next 5 years and for biotech production to become dominant within the next decade. The key challenge will be for the public to accept GMO (genetically modified organisms).

Plant cells are excellent production matrixes for expression of recombinant proteins with important pharmaceutical properties. Recombinant protein expression methods have been widely used in vaccine production, cytokine manufacturing, and even to make therapeutic proteins for human use. Plant cells are genetically modified for recombinant protein expression and then standard cell culture techniques are applied.

For example, cell culture in a bioreactor using genetically modified rice cells is being carried out by the Korean company “Natural Bio‐Materials (NBM)”, for a variety of growth factors (Epidermal Growth Factor, Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor, Keratinocyte Growth Factor, Fibroblast Growth Factor‐7, etc.). These human recombinant proteins have undeniably better purity, and the production can be engineered to be fully animal‐, virus‐, bacteria- and exotoxin‐free. The key to adoption will be to convince a significant portion of consumers who refuse to accept GMO-based ingredients.

The Real Potential of Biotechnology in CPG

Because biotech can leverage billions of microbes to produce active ingredients, and these ingredients can be tailored to target specific functionality at high concentrations, it can scale to mass production while remaining less resource (water/energy) intensive, not requiring agricultural land, not straining biodiversity with monoculture, and not depending on petrochemical production. Therefore, biotech ingredients will always be more sustainable.

With new genetic manipulation techniques (e.g., CRISPR) and faster biochemical analytics tools (e.g., genome sequencing, transcriptome/metabolic analysis), biotech will usher in a much faster pace for ingredient discovery and optimization. Today, many companies can go from concept to production in little over a year. Reverse engineering can take hours. Furthermore, the ever-increasing speed of computers and AI /machine-learning advances mean that databases can be searched faster, and organisms modeled more efficiently, eliminating the trial-and-error of earlier biotech research.

For example, companies like Checkerspot can engineer the cellular activity of microalgae to produce fatty acids with a variety of chain lengths and with functionality in multiple locations. This will lead to new oleochemicals ranging from emollients and lubricants to dielectric fluids and polyurethanes for outdoor gear. New enzymes for food applications, detergents, or cleansers, are being developed with biotech by DuPont for supplements, animal nutrition, as well as personal and household care, respectively.

Summary

Biotechnology has blossomed from purely pharmaceuticals to a much broader range of commercial application in the last several decades. As new technologies lower the cost of biotech research while increasing its speed and throughput, more industries will adopt the infrastructure of biotechnology, and the number of naturally derived biotech ingredients in consumer goods will increase.

Industrial biotech today has expanded beyond its original high-volume bio-fuel objective to the production of lower-volume, higher-value ingredients for consumer goods. Products ranging from pet food to anti-aging creams to spider-silk fabrics have a biotech or synthetic biology option today.

Innovation of such bio-engineered ingredients will only accelerate as gene-editing tools, computer algorithms, and automated fermentation scaleup enable scientists to make any product they can imagine. And, as costs of these bio-ingredients decrease with large-scale consumer adoption and mass production, I fully expect biotech ingredients to dominate many industries, and usher in a new area of sustainability in cosmetics, supplements, as well as personal and household care.