Nutrition Act launches new technology "Perfex vivo"

 Nutrition Act is focusing on sales of raw materials for cosmetics, supplements and health foods, OEM of functional foods and cosmetics, as well as contract testing service business.

The "ex vivo analysis test service" developed by the company as a domestic sole agent is an analysis test service using live human skin tissue by Bio-EC Laboratory of France, and it can be applied to the skin in an environment as close as possible to the actual skin. Can be evaluated for its usefulness.

It would be a great advantage to be able to visualize and quantify changes in the skin. In this test, the skin tissue is stained and the changes inside the skin are evaluated by image analysis.

Therefore, it is possible to check the amount of melanin produced, increase in collagen, increase / decrease in moisturizing components, etc. at the tissue / cell level, and judge by images or numerical values. It can also be used as supporting data for changes that have occurred on the surface of the skin, such as the depth of wrinkles.

The main efficacy tests include anti-aging, whitening, UV protection, moisturizing, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, hair growth, anti-pollution, anti-blue light, etc. It is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of food as well as cosmetics.

Since last year, we have also started to propose "Perfex vivo", which can be tested in an environment closer to human skin conditions than ex vivo. In ex vivo, it was necessary to carry out all in the incubator, but in perfex vivo, it became possible to culture and test skin tissue pieces outside the incubator.

The inside of the incubator is a good environment for the epidermis and dermis, but the temperature and humidity are too high for the stratum corneum. Since Perfex vivo can be performed outside the incubator, the stratum corneum can be tested in an open air environment, and the skin surface temperature can be tested at a temperature close to the physiological temperature. Furthermore, by fixing the skin tissue piece to the support base, shrinkage of the skin is less likely to occur, and the actual skin environment is more reproduced.

In addition, it has become possible to evaluate the micro-relief (texture) of the surface at the same time as the evaluation of the inside of the skin. In the evaluation of the skin barrier function, in addition to the histological evaluation of filaggrin on the inside, the amount of water on the surface of the skin can be evaluated at the same time.

The test period is up to 10 days for ex vivo and up to 5 days for perfex vivo, so it is recommended to select according to the test content.

The strength of the company is that it can create a custom-made test plan, and we will continue to flexibly respond to customer needs while making proposals.

"In the future, we would like to promote the introduction on a research basis and convey the technology of Bio-EC Laboratory to people in fields where we have not been able to make many proposals until now."