16 SITE VISIT Tim Probert – Editor, Personal Care Global
As it celebrates its 40th anniversary, editor Tim Probert visits Silab’s 75,000 m2
headquarters near Brive-
la-Gaillarde in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of south-central France. Here, he learns the secrets of Silab’s considerable success in cosmetic active ingredients
Staying ahead of the pack
Silab has always been ahead of the curve. Established in 1984 in collaboration with the University of Limoges and the Limousin department government in France, Silab - Société Industrielle Limousine d’Applications Biologiques – was created to valorise products from the blood of cows and other bovine extracts. A significant chunk of Silab’s early business
was selling bovine serum albumin, a powerful protein for cosmetic applications – specifically for its lifting and tensor effects – to major French cosmetics houses. It was also used for antibodies and in pharmaceuticals. In the late 1980s, however, disaster struck.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, led cosmetics companies – and drugs manufacturers – to stop using products of bovine origin. Under different leadership, the effect on Silab might have been catastrophic. But Silab
PERSONAL CARE September 2024
was led by Jean Paufique, a true visionary. Paufique began his career in child nutrition
and contributed greatly to its rapid expansion as an inventor-developer of baby food with Danone. After more than a decade of leading Danone’s
innovation in dried products as director of a nearby research centre, he was invited to leave the Limousin region to lead a project in north- east France. Yet Paufique was born and bred in Limousin and he did not want to leave, so he took up an offer by local partners to be the founder of Silab while continuing to work for Danone locally.
Plant-based cosmetic actives The early success with bovine byproducts eventually led Paufique to concentrate on Silab, but he was well aware of the looming problem with BSE. A year before the crisis took hold in the public eye, Paufique asked the Silab R&D
team to transfer its knowledge from obtaining proteins from bovine blood to obtaining proteins from plants and vegetables. That team, which included current chief
executive officer Brigitte Closs-Gonthier, started work on extracting and purifying proteins from wheat and lupins grown in abundance in the nearby Massif Central. Back then, Silab was still very much a
startup with an almost collegiate atmosphere. The approximately 20 staff often worked on weekends to develop their plant-based alternatives to bovine byproducts. Their hard work paid off. By 1991, Silab
was ready to take their first two plant-based cosmetic ingredients to market. The first ingredients were Tensine and
Liftiline. Tensine was a plant tensor active ingredient obtained using a highly selective extraction and purification technology that enhanced the intrinsic viscoelastic properties of wheat proteins.
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