Permanent Sun Protection
A permanent sunscreen that lives in the skin instead of on it.
Sunscreen is the only sun protection available for skin that has to be uncovered, and it fails in every direction: it lasts an hour or two, it pollutes reefs, it feels unpleasant, it looks wrong, and almost nobody applies it correctly. Skin cancer still occurs more often than all other cancers combined.
Skin already solved this problem once. The three rows below are the same job done three ways, and the third is ours.
Invelanin uses the same encapsulation chemistry as Magic Ink with the pigment swapped for an ultra-stable absorber, so the particles stay where they are placed and the absorber never leaves. Because dermal sun damage is what drives visible aging as well as cancer risk, protection sitting in the dermis addresses both at the depth where they happen. One treatment, no reapplication, nothing to wash into a reef.
Mouse studies are underway and the early results are encouraging: the implants appear to be doing what they should in living skin, which is the finding we needed before taking the idea toward people. Jesse Butterfield’s doctoral thesis reports the first of this data. It is preliminary, and we are treating it that way.
In development in my lab. HYPRSKN Inc. licenses the technology.
Sunscreen
Protects skin by stopping ultraviolet light before it enters, through a combination of absorption and reflection at the surface. It works, but only while it is there: an hour or two, correctly applied, reapplied on schedule, and washed off into the water afterward.
Melanin
Protects skin from the inside, absorbing ultraviolet light and dissipating it as heat while the light scatters through the epidermis. Permanent, self-maintaining and free, which is why it is the standard we are trying to match. The catch is that you cannot choose how much of it you have.
Invelanin
Protects skin the way melanin does, absorbing and dissipating ultraviolet light as it scatters, but one layer deeper and invisible. Ultra-stable absorbers sealed in medical-grade polymer, implanted in the dermis, undetectable to the eye and visible only under ultraviolet photography. Like melanin, but deeper and invisible.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.