How to protect and repair the skin: a new paradigm. ROS* and antioxidants.

The key concept is that the skin is alive and quite capable of doing its job, until it isn’t. What has changed?  The skin ages, or is damaged, or the environment changes and overwhelms the defenses.

Our answer: replenish the skin’s natural defenses by carefully following the established antioxidant system already at work in our skin.  We don’t innovate in the sense that we don’t build from scratch; we only refresh, “top-up” the natural order. We can achieve this because we understand how the skin functions:  its anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology.  Amazing scientific advances in the last few decades have made this possible, and we have the means. Skin Active Proteins LLC supplies highly active, pure proteins that can supplement the antioxidant activity of our own proteins.

The problem:

To protect your body, the skin has to withstand a constant bombardment by reactive oxygen species, ROS*, from the outside (delivered to the skin by the environment) and generated within the skin itself, either as a response to incident UV radiation or formed when our (amazing but imperfect) mitochondria respire.

The antioxidant system in our own cells is very complex, as shown in the following figure.  I include it in a large size so that you can appreciate the complexity of the system.  The top part shows what happens in the epidermis, the bottom part describes the events in the dermis. You can see the external  (UV, urban particulate matter, noxious chemicals) and internal (imperfect respiration) factors that contribute ROS* and how they damage the cell and the skin. On the left, the damaged macromolecules: DNA (think mutations and cancer), proteins (wrinkles, pigmentation disorders), lipids (cell death). In black, contributors to ROS*. In blue, the systems capable of disarming ROS*.

Figure 1.  From Rinnerhaler, M., Bischof, J., Streubel, M.K., Trost, A. and Richter, K. (2015) Oxidative Stress in Aging Human Skin. Biomolecules, 5, 545-589.    http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom5020545. Interplay between different ROS* sources and the anti-oxidative systems in the skin.   This figure shows you that our body has antioxidant systems capable of disarming ROS*. What is not shown here (but is discussed extensively in the paper) is how these defenses can be insufficient to deal with real life, especially in a polluted environment.

And here is a figure that shows you that our bodies may be unable to cope with ROS* as it relates to the situation in the lining of the lungs (there is no equivalent in the literature showing how it is for the skin). I include it here not to scare you but to show how the intrinsic capacity of the body to deal with ROS* can be completely overwhelmed in polluted cities, and it means that people in Pune, Beijing, New Delhi and Indonesia (and many others) are exposed to more ROS* that their lungs (and probably skin) can cope with.

Figure 2.  From Lakey, P. S. J., Berkemeier, T., Tong, H., Arangio, A. M., Lucas, K., Pöschl, U., & Shiraiwa, M. (2016). Chemical exposure-response relationship between air pollutants and reactive oxygen species in the human respiratory tract. Scientific Reports,  6: 32916. . doi:10.1038/srep32916.      Total ROS concentration in the epithelial lining fluid after two hours of inhalation and deposition of ambient PM2.5  (fine particular matter). In panel (C), the green-striped horizontal bar indicates the ROS level characteristic for healthy humans (~100 nmol L−1), and the gray envelope represents the range of aerosol-induced ROS concentrations obtained with the approximate upper and lower limit mass fractions of redox-active components typically observed in ambient PM2.5. Total water-soluble fractions of iron and copper can range from ~5–25% and ~20–60%, respectively, in a wide range of different environments, which are represented by the error bars.1.  Amazon (before recent intentional and intensive destruction by fire and Bolsonaro)  2. Edinburgh 3. Toronto 4. Tokyo 5. Budapest 6. Hong Kong 7. Milan 8. Guangzhou 9. Pune 10. Beijing 11. New Delhi 12. Indonesia.

DISCLAIMER: These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent any disease.