I have steered away from poking at the cosmetics industry in this blog; it is simply too obvious, a sitting duck of marketing flim-flam atop nonsensical pseudoscience. But the latest skincare 'revolution' that has been sweeping the beauty world deserves a comment. It comes from Sif Cosmetics based in Iceland and is called BIOEFFECT EGF serum. The media is awash with the news of this miracle cream whose bioactive component is 'grown inside bio-engineered barley plants that thrive in bacteria-free volcanic ash' www.dailymail.co.uk. And there is plenty of chatter on the beauty blogs, not all of it as gushing as you might imagine (see www.juliegabriel.com)
The key ingredient in the magical cream is EGF or Epidermal Growth Factor. EGF is one of many proteins in our bodies that tells cells when to divide by binding to a receptor on their surface and triggering an internal signalling pathway. Human EGF has been used in a number of skin creams and it is claimed to improve your skin / prevent ageing by speeding up the rate at which skin cells are replaced. As it is impossible to go around extracting EGF from 'donor' humans just so that other richer, vainer humans can spread it on their faces, EGF for face creams has to be produced in genetically modified organisms. Usually these are bacteria, yeast, or animal cell cultures engineered to express the human gene that encodes the EGF protein. The EGF protein is then extracted from these GM organisms or cells, purified and added to the usual concoction of glycerine and water to make a face cream.
The BIOEFFECT serum is different in that the EGF is produced in genetically modified barley plants. I can just about see why people might be more comfortable smearing a protein on their face that has been isolated from barley than bacteria, but is there really any benefit to making the protein in plants? Not to you there isn't. The protein is pretty much exactly the same whichever organism it is produced in and if it is properly isolated, then background contaminants are not an issue. In fact, almost all the benefits are in favour of the company making the product, Sif Cosmetics and their parent biotechnology company ORF genetics. The latter website helpfully lists all these benefits.
Most of them relate to the purity of the EGF. From the consumer point of view, pure ingredients are obviously best, but there is relatively little evidence that EGF from barley is any purer than that from bacteria or animal cells. However, it is almost certainly cheaper to produce pure EGF from barley than from bacteria. When any recombinant protein is produced, either for pharmaceutical or cosmetic purposes, it has to be separated from all the other proteins and molecules in the host organism. Usually this is done by altering the gene sequence slightly so that the recombinant protein is made with what is known as an 'affinity tag' at one end - a string of extra amino acids that has a high affinity for another molecule that in turn can be immobilised onto a solid chromatography matrix. This allows the recombinant protein to be purified by affinity chromatography. In the ORF genetics system, the recombinant EGF protein is expressed only in the seeds of the genetically modified barley plants. In comparison to bacteria or animal cells, the seed endosperm is a very simple system with only a few storage proteins present. This means that the protein profile (the number of different types of protein present) is very simple and cheaper, less sophisticated protein fractionation techniques can be used to isolate the EGF protein.
ORF genetics also claims that their EGF preparation from barley has lower endotoxin content (nonsense: endotoxins are small metabolites easily separated from proteins in all protein purification approaches), lists 'lower endoprotease activity' as an advantage (this just means that the recombinant protein is less likely to be degraded by host protein-digesting enzymes making it easier for ORF genetics to recover more intact recombinant protein) and says that there is no risk of transmission of 'infective agents' (ie disease causing bacteria or viruses). This last one is probably true, but rather overlooks other known dangers of plant materials such as allergenicity and the presence of bacteria such as Bacillus cereus that cause food poisoning (the latter is well known in connection with rice, but in fact is present in most cereals including barley!).
The other benefit that the ORF genetics website fails to mention is that it is substantially cheaper in general to produce recombinant proteins in plants than in bacteria or animal cell cultures. This is because the latter are grown in large vats known as chemostats which are expensive to run, requiring a constant supply of nutrient solution to support the growth of the bacteria or cells. Plants by contrast, can be grown relatively cheaply in a greenhouse (in the Icelandic case, the greenhouse is heated by geothermal energy). This, and the fact that production of recombinant proteins in plants can be massively scaled up (think fields of GM crops) has lead to an increasing uptake of plants as 'biofactories' for production of useful molecules. And not all of this sophisticated biotechnology is wasted on cosmetics. Sometimes, it is put to better use. For example, insulin is now being produced in a thistle-like plant called safflower (www.sembiosys.com).
No comments:
Post a Comment