New Boots skin cream could offer hope to burn victims and help heal scars on people’s faces

A breakthrough in skin care has led to a face cream that could offer hope for healing burns and scars.

Anti-aging skin creams aim to repair damage caused by decades of sun exposure, leaving the skin looking less elastic and youthful.

Dermatologists have been striving for this for the past 20 years using peptides – artificial versions of protein fragments in the skin that can cause damage repair.

Now a new No7 skin cream uses two promising new peptides.

It took 15 years to identify these, using artificial intelligence to understand how to produce them from proteins in the lab.

Tests on real human skin suggest that the peptides regenerated the extracellular matrix – the layer of proteins that makes skin resilient.

But they also showed signs of repair in the upper skin layers, which could potentially help burn victims and those with severe wounds, though more research is needed to determine that.

Findings on the technology were presented last month at the annual meeting of the British Society for Investigative Dermatology and at the conference of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The new skincare range, No7 Future Renew Damage Reversal, launches on Wednesday, including a day cream, night cream, serum and eye serum from £24.95.

Mike Sherratt, professor of biochemistry at the University of Manchester, who was involved in the development of the skin cream, said: ‘The peptides we found cause cells to make the same type of proteins that should be produced to heal burns and wounds. . that’s promising.

“Our approach is to produce artificial peptides that we think play an important role in the body.”

The multi-billion dollar skin cream industry relies on certain proteins, such as collagen and fibrillin, that keep skin looking youthful.

The proteins do this by breaking down into smaller fragments called peptides, which signal the skin to repair damage.

The new skincare range, No7 Future Renew Damage Reversal, launches on Wednesday, including a day cream, night cream, serum and eye serum from £24.95

Professor Sherratt and his team set out to find out which of the approximately 3,000 proteins in the skin were most damaged by the sun, and thus likely to produce peptides.

Then they had to know the precise location of each protein where it broke apart to become a peptide.

The calculation of that location, using artificial intelligence, allowed researchers to create artificial peptides that they say should be much closer to the peptides actually found in the body.

This is why they believe the peptides worked so well on skin cells and real people.

When the cream was applied to the arms of eight volunteers in Manchester, they started producing more proteins, including fibrillin – an important protein that gives skin elasticity.

The peptides stimulated the production of more than 50 proteins, making the skin more youthful.

Tests on real human skin suggest the peptides regenerated the extracellular matrix – the layer of proteins that makes skin resilient

The research team says individual dermatologists want to look at the medical applications next.

The skin cream came from a shortlist of 22 peptides, which was narrowed down to two, based on ones that could penetrate the skin and be synthesized in the lab.

The two peptides together, in large amounts in the cream, can deliver a strong enough “fix me” signal for the body to pick up on.

No7 says this is the biggest development since the company produced its Protect & Perfect serum, which was so advanced it appeared on the BBC’s Horizon program in 2007.

In the aftermath, five months’ worth of stock flew off the shelves at Boots in one day and more than 50,000 people joined a waiting list for the product.

Arne Akbar, a professor of immunology at University College London, who was not involved in the study, said: ‘This is a team with impeccable credentials.

‘The developed peptide prediction is a very interesting concept.

‘It is innovative, robust work that is the first exciting step on a long journey.

“They’ve shown that, in terms of skin, you can reconstruct parts of it.”