With Governments across the globe including India banning testing of cosmetics and its ingredients on animals, the cosmetic and pharma firms can now look towards eSkIN, a first-of-its-kind computational platform for skin research
that can ascertain the efficacy and adverse effects of cosmetic formulations.
The world’s first comprehensive system biology tool, eSkIN is developed by the Central Science and Industrial Research(CSIR)’s lab Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), under the Union Science and Technology Ministry in collaboration with Pune-based private firm Persistent System. The project has been funded under CSIR-NMITlI scheme.
Dr Anurag Agarwal, principal scientist at CSIR-IGIB said that the skin data analysis tool is aimed at meeting the need of experiments conducted by the cosmetic and pharma industries without torturing any animal. By just a few clicks, it will tell what will be the likely result of that data, he added..
“The software is a collection of large data available in the open domain and offers an intuitive solution which can study the data generated by the companies during the manufacture of a particular cosmetic product,” he said.
So far discovery of new pharmaceutical and cosmetic products traditionally required testing in animals to ascertain the efficacy and adverse effects of these products. However, with the ban of cosmetic testing on animal which has been costly and time consuming, the countries had been looking for development of alternate methods, Dr Aggarwal said.
“After intensive research, we have developed eSkIN platform that will empower pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies to predict the effects of their products on human skin in a cost and time-efficient manner with reduced animal testing,” as per the website of the Pune-based Persistent System.
It also said that it converts large scale high-through put Omics data into biomedical knowledge and is a repository of over 2600 plus skin specific genes obtained by manual curation of biomedical literature.
“The eSkIN reduces number of invitro and animal experiments by early elimination of undesirable compounds,” the company’s website said.
Dr Sanjay Kumar, Director of CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, who also heads IGIB said that the eSkin tool will no doubt reduce animal usage and revolutionize skin centric analysis.