BASF and Biomillenia join forces in microbiome research to promote healthy skin

Research aims to identify novel dermocosmetic active ingredients via unique microbiome-on-a-chip technology.

The French company Biomillenia will contribute its unique microbiome-on-a-chip technology that has the ability to grow specific microbes and maintain a higher diversity of living microbes than with standard microbiology methods. It will allow BASF to explore how active ingredients can modulate the presence and growth of the skin microbiota, and consequently affect its health. By bringing together interdisciplinary know-how from within the company as well as from external partners, BASF constantly expands its activities dedicated to developing solutions acting on or through the skin microbiota. “The skin hosts a huge and varied microbiota and as such plays an important role in skin health. Biomillenia’s ability to rapidly identify novel microbes and screen for active ingredients involved in promoting healthy skin will enable new research possibilities and market opportunities for BASF,” said David Hérault, R&D Global Director of BASF Beauty Care Solutions. “The microbiome is a vast natural pool of mostly undiscovered microbes that can be leveraged across several industries, including consumer health, agriculture, animal health and food. We are supporting companies in these sectors by providing access to our technology platform to culture and perform functional analysis of microbes in low volume droplets using proprietary lab-on-a-chip technology. In addition, our customers can gain access to our microbial culture collection and state of the art microbe isolation and sequencing technologies,” said Dirk Loeffert, Ph.D., CEO of Biomillenia.