In vitro and in Silico approaches to evaluate usefulness and safety of chemical compounds applied or exposed on skin

Abstract

Recently, animal experiments become very difficult to be done in the research and development of cosmetics and cosmeceuticals due to animal welfare and 3Rs (replacement, reduction, refinement) concept. However, usefulness and safety of these preparations must be strictly guaranteed before human use. We thus proposed three sets of extrapolation methods to estimate in vivo profiles from in vitro and in silico approaches, to evaluate permeation profiles through real human skin from those through animal skin and cultured human skin model, and to estimate responses such as usefulness and safety of cosmetics and cosmeceuticals from their skin permeation and concentration profiles. Although we need more data and discussion, the present extrapolation methods must be very useful for estimation of cosmetics and cosmeceuticals without using animal experiments. © 2014 The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan.