A biotech company is collecting human skin donated from cosmetic surgery and keeping it alive for testing

• Genoskin is a company that takes leftover skin from cosmetic surgeries, keeps it alive, and provides it to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries for testing.
• The samples are kept in a gel that keeps them alive and nourished for 7 days, during which they behave like skin on the body.
• The company — which gets permission from its donors — says the process meets international ethical standards and is an alternative to animal testing.
• The samples can tan, grow hair, and even heal if they are hurt.
• They can be used to test everything from the effects of UV light on skin, to immune responses, to toxic substances.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Genoskin is a company that has figured out how to keep human skin alive for up to a week away from the body, and is using their tech to provide testing samples to the biotech, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.

The company distributes little buttons of skin — kept alive in a cup of secret-recipe gel — that behave a lot like skin on our bodies. It's the closest thing to a real human test subject.

Genoskin's founder, Pascal Descargues, told Business Insider that his company collects leftover skin from cosmetic surgeries like abdominoplasty (tummy tucks) and facelifts, which would otherwise be thrown away.

"For a period of time, we have a functional organ ... and the funny part is, the hair grows, it can tan," Genoskin's chief commercial officer, Dr Eric Merle, told Business Insider.

The samples also exhibit immune responses, he said.

There's a lot of unwanted skin out there. Every year in the US alone, leftover tummy tuck skin could cover about seven football fields, the company wrote in industry magazine Soap, Perfumery and Cosmetics.

Using some of that skin, the company has developed product models for GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Unilever, all of which have published studies with Genoskin.

The samples become the testing ground for measuring a wide range of factors — including the skin's absorption, melanin levels, inflammation, or immune response, and how it reacts to toxins, UV light, or pollution.

The company offers different models that help research different things — for example, InflammaSkin, meant for testing anti-inflammatory drugs; HypoSkin, which comes with a layer of fat meant for injections; or NativeSkin, which is designed to display immune responses.

Despite the horror-movie overtones, Genoskin says that Genoskin's way of working is both scientifically and ethically sound. One argument is that it provides an alternative to animal testing.

But just as important for Genoskin is that "human data" — ie, what we learn from testing on human skin — is far more scientifically reliable for human applications.

"We have transformed that hypervariable thing, which is a human, into a living product that people can test on," said Merle.

Conventional alternatives have limitations

Labs have several options for clinical skin trials. Firstly, there's animal testing, which is relatively inexpensive but comes with huge public objection.

It's already illegal in the EU and several other countries for cosmetic or household products. In October 2019, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would move away from requiring animal testing.

"Guinea pigs are just not relevant," said Merle, who owns a beagle, the breed of dog most often used in animal testing. "They're just too cute, and they're not relevant to human data."

Most of the data derived from animal testing "makes no sense" when applied to humans, Merle argued.

There are also tissue banks, which provide either fresh or frozen skin from donated dead bodies, known as cadavers. But dead skin has a narrower range of uses.

Conventional biopsies are the nearest alternative — when tissue samples are taken from a living volunteer for the purposes of diagnosis or clinical study.

But there's only so many biopsies that can be taken from one person. As Merle put it: "There's not a patient in a clinical study who would authorize being turned into Swiss cheese."

These samples also don't include the hypodermis — the fatty layer, which is included in Genoskin's HypoSkin product. The advantage of this layer is that the sample can receive injections.

(Genoskin has just applied for a patent on a circulation system for the samples, which they hope will make injections work even more like the real thing).

Biopsies also don't have immune or healing responses. But if you cut one of Genoskin's samples, you'll be able to watch the wound start to knit, said Merle.

The whole process is orchestrated like an organ donation, by Genoskin's 'air traffic controller'

The process starts with a patient who is having cosmetic surgery at one of Genoskin's partner hospitals in the US or France. They are mostly white females between the ages of 30 and 60, although around 20% of donors are men.

When a surgery is booked at one of the hospitals — which Merle declined to name — the patient is asked if they'd like to donate. Merle told Business Insider that fewer than 20% say no.

Those who agree "can change their mind at any time," and are asked a second time just before the surgery, Merle said.

There's no way for any of Genoskin's 25 employees to identify the donor, he said. The company only knows their age, gender, and ethnicity. They also learn of any major health conditions, and test the samples for HIV.

Genoskin says its process is in line with the Declaration of Helsinki, an agreement first adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964 which sets the ethical standard for using human materials in medical research.

Genoskin works indirectly with around 1,000 donors a year this way, using a tight supply chain.

Merle described the coordinator of this as an "air traffic controller" who is watching a calendar of upcoming surgeries and matching them to client schedules.

The coronavirus pandemic has put non-essential surgeries on hold around the world, halting the supply of skin. But on May 11, the day France partially lifted its lockdown, two new surgeries came back online.

On the day of surgery, Genoskin usually pays a fee to the hospital to package and send the sample. The skin floats in a tiny cup of a solution made by the company, which is turned into a gel at the Genoskin lab.

At the top is a small circle of flesh, up to an inch wide.

There is also a "culture medium" underneath which keeps the skin alive, and is changed daily. The samples are then FedExed in a temperature-regulated, impact-proof box.

Within 48 hours of the surgeon's knife, the skin is with the client. It can be injected, rubbed with substances, cut, burned with UV light, or undergo more or less any other process a researcher might want to see.

The samples are warm to the touch

Ethical constraints meant that Business Insider could not see a sample of the product. But Merle said that the skin feels real.

One fact is that it is exactly as warm as your own skin. While biological samples are generally kept cool or frozen, these are living tissues, and are kept at body temperature: around 98.6 degrees.

The best way to get a sense of what a sample feels like is to hold the bit of flesh between your thumb and index finger, said Merle.

"When you just push right here, it has a little bit of give ... people just aren't used to that," he said.

Genoskin thinks this is the future of clinical testing

The likelihood of Genoskin-tested products being in your makeup bag is pretty slim, said Merle.

The cosmetics industry was an early adopter due to public pressure to find alternatives to animal testing, but the uptake is limited in this area because it costs a lot of money.

Companies "still spend a lot more money on fancy jars than on the science," Merle said. "[Genoskin] is an expensive proposition."

The company so far is self-funded and has invited no investors, said Merle. According to publicly-available records, the company ran a profit for three years until 2018, when it lost $167,696. In 2019, the company became profitable and doubled in size, Merle said.

The company's clientele has shifted more towards pharmaceutical and biotech companies, which are coming under increasingly stringent regulation. In 2019, Genoskin was invited to train FDA reviewers in drug development.

"There's going to come a time where regulatory bodies are going to say: 'No, you can't just go test on a human being. I don't care if they're a volunteer. I want to see data before that.' That's the future," said Merle.

Asked how non-scientists react to his work, he said: "We more often receive amazed comments than ghoulish comments," he said. "There is quite a 'wow' factor ... I still am impressed every day that this is possible."