L'Oreal will team up with BioPrint to mass produce artificial skin

Printing human tissue sounds horrifying, but existing 3D printing technology has been able to do this. In order to improve the accuracy and speed of manufacturing artificial skin, L'Oreal, a well-known cosmetics company, intends to team up with Organovo, a startup that specializes in bioprinting technology, to mass produce artificial skin.

Prior to working with Organovo, L'Oreal was already using traditional tissue culture methods to make artificial skin. They use the cells in the skin tissue donated by the surgical patient as raw materials to simulate the environment in the human body and culture the cells. After a while, skin tissue samples can be obtained. However, this method takes a long time, and a single skin sample of 0.5 cm 2 and 1 mm thick takes about a week to be cultivated. It is understood that L'Oreal produces about 100,000 skin samples per year, half of which is for their own cosmetic research and the other half for pharmaceutical companies or other cosmetic companies that are competitors.

Organovo's approach is different. They use a special "Bio-Ink" to print skin tissue layer by layer. Organovo will help L'Oreal to increase the precision and speed of producing artificial skin. Similar techniques have previously been hoped to help patients with facial injuries/burns recover faster.

This is the first time that bio-printing company Organovo has collaborated with a cosmetics company, which previously served mainly biopharmaceutical companies and university medical centers.