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Growing artificial skin to change how cosmetics firm test products

GRASSE, France: A European plan to end animal testing in 2009 is forcing global cosmetics firms to find new tools

The delicate hybrids thriving in the balmy climate of southern France's historic perfume region include sweet jasmine, May roses - and fresh layers of artificial human tissue.

In a land where the making of fragrances dates back to the Renaissance, scientists in Provence are working feverishly to develop biotechnological tools to test cosmetics with new alternatives before a European Union ban on animal testing comes into effect in March 2009.

These unglamorous materials - reconstructed eye tissues, tiny circles of human skin developed with donor cells harvested from plastic surgery - are state-of-the-art industrial tools for the multbillion-dollar global cosmetics industry. They are a vital part of the industry's future as it faces rapidly tightening European government regulations - rules applying to any company wishing to sell in the 27-nation European Union.

The looming EU ban is forcing multinational companies with weaker rules to adapt new practices to sell in the market. It is bringing together European regulators in Brussels with agencies from the world's two other largest cosmetics markets - the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Ministry of Health in Japan - to harmonize regulations.

The new standards are also forcing longtime, secretive rivals to cooperate, grudgingly and sometimes with prodding from regulators and politicians. The European commissioner for science, Janez Potocnik, appeared this month at a meeting for multinational companies and chided them for slowing the search for alternatives by not sharing enough information.

The stakes are high. Europe is the leading market, and it also exports more than €16 billion, or $23.4 billion, worth of cosmetics every year. U.S. trade to Europe amounts to nearly $2 billion a year, about 7 percent of all cosmetics purchased by Europeans. In third place is Japan, with total cosmetics sales last year of ¥1.76 trillion, or $16 billion.

"Without question these regulations are having an impact," said Dr. Alan Goldberg, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "What company is going to want to eliminate 450 million customers by not complying?"

The proof is in research budgets. The European Commission is spending almost €25 million yearly on alternative test projects, while many countries are seeding programs with annual budgets of €15 million to €20 million. L'Oréal devoted more than $800 million over the past 20 years to the development of alternative tests, while its U.S. rival Procter & Gamble, maker of the Cover Girl mass-market cosmetics line, has spent almost $225 million.

"For the cosmetics industry, it's a race," said Hervé Groux, 45, a French immunology scientist who presides over a year-old research lab in Grasse to aid smaller companies lacking resources of corporate titans like L'Oréal or Procter & Gamble. "The rules are pushing everyone to move faster and to put more money into research."

Groux's lab, Immunosearch, had its official debut party Wednesday in a boxy industrial park where Groux and his wife, a molecular biologist, and other newly recruited veteran researchers are striving to shape a new world of beauty research - and at the same time spare the lives of thousands of rabbits, mice, rats and guinea pigs.

As the 2009 deadline approaches, European regulators issue periodic tallies of the number of laboratory animals potentially spared by new alternatives for all types of industrial purposes. Part of the pressure for new tests also stems from additional legislation, known as Reach, that requires companies to develop safety data over the next 11 years for 30,000 chemicals, raising the specter of more animal testing. The actual number of animals tested for cosmetics products is small compared with medical or educational uses, according to a new European Commission report. But still the tally grew 50 percent in Europe, to 5,571 animals, from 2002 to 2005.

Much of that animal testing was taking place in France, which leads the European Union for the practice and vigorously fought the ban, ultimately appealing, in vain, to the European Court of Human Justice.

But it is also in Provence - a region fabled for its fragrances and the professional "noses" who create them - where scientists are gathering to work on alternative testing research "in vitro," or literally in the glass.

In Nice, SkinEthic is a 15-year-old company that is developing and manufacturing a product line of cellular tools that includes a wide range of human tissues. Last year, SkinEthic was purchased by L'Oréal, which propelled the parent company into a dominant position in the testing field with two critical patents on reconstructed skin. SkinEthic produces its own form of reconstructed skin, RHE, while L'Oréal holds the patent to Episkin, which its scientists developed in Lyon.

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