TESTING
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Mastering product development programmes
Mark Cresswell - Lucideon
As a materials development and commercialisation organisation, Lucideon often partners with leading industry partners to help them find solutions to some of their toughest materials-related challenges. Within the personal care industry, this support is offered at all stages of the product development process: from R&D and feasibility prototype/concept development all the way through to on-market product improvement or troubleshooting. This article will highlight one specific case where the combination of materials and analytical expertise led to outstanding results for a partner product development company. Our partner company had identified a novel
synergistic combination of two skincare actives. These actives had showed good initial clinical efficacy and now needed to be incorporated into industry-standard skincare product formats. The two actives had polar opposite solubility properties: one was very water soluble and the other was highly water insoluble. As a result, it was not known which product
format would be suitable for delivering both actives effectively and for enabling the bioavailability required to support the clinical efficacy previously demonstrated. Lucideon employed its industry-wide expertise and know-how from both a materials/product development perspective as well as its world- leading testing and characterisation capabilities to overcome this challenge.
Defining the challenge Any product development challenge should begin by evaluating the potential development journey from start to finish, highlighting which are likely to be the key technical challenges to overcome. In this instance two key challenges were identified. Firstly, how to incorporate the very poorly
water-soluble active ingredient into different product formats that were intended to be predominantly water-based. Secondly, how to design and construct
the basic compositional chassis of different potential formats to fit within the first significant constraint. A literature review was first carried out to
establish what was understood about the basic physicochemical characteristics of the two active ingredients. Properties such as molecular weight, molar volume, Van der Waals volume/ surface area, polarisability, aqueous solubility,
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partition coefficient (octanol/water), acid/ base dissociation behaviour, boiling point, and thermal stability all needed to be defined and theoretically or experimentally derived where necessary and feasible. With this data to hand, the use of Hansen
solubility parameters (HSP) is an excellent way of identifying and optimising solubilisers or solubilisation systems for specific ingredients. HSP are a theoretically derived, but crucially, experimentally proven way of defining how similar one material is to another: if two materials have similar HSP values then there is a good chance that they will ‘like’ being near to each other, in a thermodynamic sense. Broadly, in this case, if a solute has HSP
values similar to a potential solubiliser (or solvent) then there is a good chance that the two materials will be miscible with each other, or that the solute will dissolve in the solvent. In practice, all materials can be defined by
three fundamental physical parameters that enables their overall character to be plotted as a single point on a three-dimensional plot. The relative distance between two materials plotted within this 3D space provides a good indication of how likely they are to mix with each other.1 We used this approach to identify potential
solubilising agents for the poorly water-soluble skincare active we were working with. Critical to this step was extensive solubility testing of the poorly water-soluble active ingredient within a range of solvents and solubilisers to establish
with a high degree of confidence the HSP for this ingredient. These values are often published but we
found discrepancies between the literature- cited HSP as compared with the HSP of the specific grades of active materials being used in this product development programme. Theoretical identification of potential
solubilisers, followed by experimental evaluation of their ability to solubilise our poorly water-soluble ingredient, enabled us to produce a longlist of potential candidate materials. Further evaluation and screening based on availability, safety, regulatory status, industry acceptance, consumer perception, and cost allowed us to narrow the list of potential candidate solubilisers down to a more acceptable number to take forward into full formulation trials.
Developing the formulation chassis There was a specific consumer/sensory guided requirement for this programme, in that aqueous-based formats with a lightweight and low-residue feel were desired. Considering both this and the unique solubility constraints of the specific active ingredients, four different product format types (gel cream, serum, lotion, and light cream) were identified and targeted for development. In this way, we maximised the chances of finding a product format that could successfully incorporate both active ingredients as well
November 2023 PERSONAL CARE
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