Not only ingredients to enhance food but also raw material for “safe and sustainable” cosmetics. Because from basil or ginger, but also from tomatoes or vegetable elements or food waste, new beauty products can be created without resorting to animal testing. The researchers of Enea are well aware of this and together with 16 partners (distributed in 12 European countries) work on the project called InnCoCells in which Arterra Bioscience for Italy and Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT) participate in the role of coordinator. The new generation of beauty products was born thanks to the use of vegetables and then contemplates the use of turmeric, kencur, peony, cranberry, jasmine and licorice.
“It is a revolution in the way in which cosmetic ingredients are discovered, manufactured and converted into validated products suitable for the market that attract today’s consumers, increasingly attentive to quality and the environment – underlines Gianfranco Diretto of the Enea Biotechnology Laboratory. -. In fact, sustainable approaches and production on an industrial scale will be applied, without resorting to animal testing but through bioassays on cell lines, a type of scientific experiment which then involves testing on human volunteers ».
Task of Enea, the chemical characterization of species and bioactive molecules, through metabolomic analyzes, but also of the development of cellular and soilless cultures of kencur, ginger, cress, perilla, basil and tomato plants. Playing an important role in this project is the company Arterra Bioscience, specialized in research and development in the field of biotechnology, which will deal with the arrangement of the growth conditions of the plant cell cultures of interest – cranberry, lychee, jasmine, licorice, hyssop and peony – and the characterization of the biological activity of plant extracts.
“InnCoCells – comments Maria Gabriella Colucci, founder and CEO of Arterra, a biotech company founded in Naples in 2004 – is in line with the mission of the company increasingly committed to the development of sustainable and highly effective active ingredients for the cosmetic market”. One of the peculiarities of the project then, the fact that the plants will be grown in “sustainable and economical way to ensure that the new ingredients do not pose risks to biodiversity or environmental safety “.
We therefore start from the identification of 10 plant species and at least 50 ingredients will be verified. Among these, 20 will then undergo production processes in cell cultures or plants grown in greenhouses, in fields or in hydro-aeroponic conditions. The team will also work on developing processes from at least 10 supply chains of agricultural and innovative and sustainable technologies for the production, on a pilot scale, of at least 10 active ingredients, in addition to the collection of regulatory and product safety dossiers and environmental assessments.