Public Funding for Ten Bio Limited

New skin products require extensive testing during development to determine safety, toxicity, and effectiveness, where required. Historically, this has necessitated the use of animal testing which has serious ethical and financial implications. The EU has been the global leader in the ban of testing of cosmetics and their ingredients in animals. In the chemical industry, tests on animals are only used when alternatives do not provide conclusive results. The pharmaceutical industry still relies on animal testing but is continually searching for alternatives to reduce the number of animals required and to generate more reliable pre-clinical data. Current skin testing alternatives have many limitations and do not correlate well with whole animal/human data which can slow the development of new products, increase development costs, or even generate misleading preclinical data. In fact, up to 500,000 animals are still used in Europe and the US annually for skin regulatory testing and research. In all these sectors, alternatives to animal testing and vastly improved human skin models are urgently sought. Ten Bio, a spin-out from the University of Dundee, has created an innovative human skin testing technology, called TenSkin(tm), using skin that would normally be discarded following surgical procedures (e.g. abdominoplasty or "tummy tuck"). Skin on the body resides under natural mechanical tension. TenSkin(tm) consists of a method and device that holds this skin at this optimised tension, which maintains the skin in a viable state for up to twice as long as competing models making it suitable for a wide range of lab testing. Application of this technology will reduce, and in some cases eliminate, the need for testing of pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetic products in animals and/or inferior skin models. This project is centred around the design and prototyping of a first-of-its-kind automated TenSkin(tm) assembly platform. This is essential to both meet the expected level of demand and enable a technology licensing revenue model for which we have already received interest from leading global companies. As a result of this project, pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetics companies across the world will have access to a novel human skin technology that provides data that is vastly more predictive of what happens on the body compared to existing systems. From wound healing to response to therapeutics, skin cultured using this tension-based technology behaves almost indistinguishably from living human skin on the body, offering users the most appropriate system for testing new dermal products.

UV light is known to inactivate SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also widely claimed that high energy UV light, called "far-UV-C", is 'safe for humans', although this claim is based predominantly on animal studies and limited studies in human volunteers. The UK is expected to begin employing far-UV-C in public spaces in 2021\. It is proposed here to _rapidly_ generate safety data showing whether or not far-UV-C causes the types of damage that full-spectrum UV light does (for example, sunburn, DNA damage, immunosuppression of the skin, and modifications to the skin microbiome, which is the natural flora that lives in healthy human skin). It is imperative that we understand the effects of far-UV-C on human skin to ensure it can be deployed to its full effect We are proposing here to conduct the following far-UV-C research projects to investigate the efficacy and safety profile of this very promising technology: * DNA damage upon acute and chronic far-UV-C exposure * DNA damage to compromised skin (for example, wounded skin) upon far-UV-C exposure * Response of immune cells resident in the skin to far-UV-C (it is known that UV-B light elicits an immune response in skin, but the effect of far-UV-C has not been evaluated) * Evaluation of skin microbiome following acute and chronic exposure to far-UV-C. Far-UV-C irradiation may kill or modify the genetic material of the beneficial flora that colonise the skin by the same mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 is inactivated * Computer simulation of far-UV-C penetration into skin guided by the data generated in the skin model We propose to conduct these experiments in our novel patent-protected _ex vivo_ skin model (TenSkin(tm)) which is the closest mimic available to human skin while still on the body.