Tag Archives: vitamins

2016 Nobel prize winner introduces anti-aging skincare line

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When last mentioned here (Oct. 6, 2016 posting), J. Fraser Stoddart, along with his French colleague Jean-Pierre Sauvage and his Dutch colleague Bernard “Ben” Feringa, had just been awarded a 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing molecular machines. In what seems like an unusual career move, Stoddart has recently introduced a skin care line. From a December 5, 2017 article by Marc S. Reisch for Chemical and Engineering News (c&en), Note: A link has been removed,

In 2016, J. Fraser Stoddart won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his part in designing a molecular machine. Now as chief technology officer and co-founder of nanotechnology firm PanaceaNano, he has introduced the “Noble” line of antiaging cosmetics including a $524 formula described as an “anti-wrinkle repair” night cream. The firm says the cream contains patented Nobel Prize-winning “organic nano-cubes” loaded with ingredients that reverse skin damage and reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

Other prize-winning chemists have founded companies, but Stoddart’s backing of the anti-aging cosmetic line takes the promotion of a new company by an award-winning scientist to the next level.

The nano-cubes are made of carbohydrate molecules known as cyclodextrins. The cubes, of various sizes and shapes, release ingredients such as vitamins and peptides onto the skin “at predefined times with molecular precision,” according to the Noble skin care website. PanaceaNano co-founder Youssry Botros, former nanotechnology research director at Intel, contends that the metering technology makes the product line “far superior to comparable products in the market today,” However, the nanocubes aren’t molecular machines, for which Stoddart won his Nobel prize.

A November 27, 2017 PanaceaNano news release on Cision PR Newswire provides more details about the skin care line,

The NOBLE skin care breakthrough technology is based on patented Organic Nano-Cube (ONC) molecules, which are made up of hollow cubes that work as molecular reservoirs to store and release skin care active ingredients in an extended release formulation directly onto the skin in a controlled manner, allowing for continuous skin revitalization, renewal and repair over a longer period of time.

Unlike other products, with ONC, you have more than just extended release. ONC molecules provide tunable release profiles that are engineered for delayed and multiple release of different ingredients that each have their own characteristics. ONC molecules are controllable at a smaller nano-scale to better control the individual molecular ingredients. NOBLE is “Skin Care with Molecular Precision” because ONC molecules really control the release of active skin care ingredients at the molecular level, instead of just putting the ingredients in a macroscopic slow-release matrix like other products in the market today.

“This molecular precision enables the NOBLE luxury skin care product line to reduce visible signs of aging more effectively by precisely releasing the anti-aging ingredients for over a longer period. Because of the revolutionary ONC technology, NOBLE has a much longer duration of anti-aging benefit with continuous and steady efficacy, making it far superior to comparable products in the market today,” says Dr. Youssry Botros, PanaceaNano Co-founder and CEO. “Other skin care brands have immediate release formulations whose active ingredients are often depleted immediately. NOBLE products are clinically proven to reverse and slow down skin aging.”

NOBLE skin care products will immediately start working on the skin. Most consumers notice relatively visible results within two weeks, while significant results are observed by most consumers after 10 to 12 weeks.

“It is an exciting moment to witness the birth of commercial products that improve the quality of life of people based on renewable, safe, organic, bio-degradable functional nanomaterials,” stated Sir Fraser.

For additional information, please go to www.noble-skincare.com

Noble/Nobel? Was someone indulging in word play?

According to the Noble skin care product page, costs range from $249. for .5 oz of anti-aging eye cream to $524 for 1.7 oz of anti-wrinkle repair cream, presumably in US dollars. Note: I am not endorsing this product as I have not used it.

For anyone interested in the parent company, PanaceaNano can be found here.

Vitamin-driven lithium-ion battery from the University of Toronto

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It seems vitamins aren’t just good for health, they’re also good for batteries. My Aug. 2, 2016 post on vitamins and batteries focused on work from Harvard, this time the work is from the University of Toronto (Canada). From an Aug. 3, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

A team of University of Toronto chemists has created a battery that stores energy in a biologically derived unit, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.

The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one important difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode: the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device.

“We’ve been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications,” says Dwight Seferos, an associate professor in U of T’s Department of Chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Polymer Nanotechnology.

“When you take something made by nature that is already complex, you end up spending less time making new material,” says Seferos.

An Aug. 2, 2016 University of Toronto news release (also on EurekAlert) by Peter McMahon, which originated the news item, explains further,

To understand the discovery, it’s important to know that modern batteries contain three basic parts:

  • a positive terminal – the metal part that touches devices to power them – connected to a cathode inside the battery casing
  • a negative terminal connected to an anode inside the battery casing
  • an electrolyte solution, in which ions can travel between the cathode and anode electrodes

When a battery is connected to a phone, iPod, camera or other device that requires power, electrons flow from the anode – the negatively charged electrode of the device supplying current – out to the device, then into the cathode and ions migrate through the electrolyte solution to balance the charge. When connected to a charger, this process happens in reverse.

The reaction in the anode creates electrons and the reaction in the cathode absorbs them when discharging. The net product is electricity. The battery will continue to produce electricity until one or both of the electrodes run out of the substance necessary for the reactions to occur.

Organic chemistry is kind of like Lego

While bio-derived battery parts have been created previously, this is the first one that uses bio-derived polymers – long-chain molecules – for one of the electrodes, essentially allowing battery energy to be stored in a vitamin-created plastic, instead of costlier, harder to process, and more environmentally-harmful metals such as cobalt.

“Getting the right material evolved over time and definitely took some test reactions,” says paper co-author and doctoral student Tyler Schon. “In a lot of ways, it looked like this could have failed. It definitely took a lot of perseverance.”

Schon, Seferos and colleagues happened upon the material while testing a variety of long-chain polymers – specifically pendant group polymers: the molecules attached to a ‘backbone’ chain of a long molecule.

“Organic chemistry is kind of like Lego,” he says. “You put things together in a certain order, but some things that look like they’ll fit together on paper don’t in reality. We tried a few approaches and the fifth one worked,” says Seferos.

Building a better power pack

The team created the material from vitamin B2 that originates in genetically-modified fungi using a semi-synthetic process to prepare the polymer by linking two flavin units to a long-chain molecule backbone.

This allows for a green battery with high capacity and high voltage – something increasingly important as the ‘Internet of Things’ continues to link us together more and more through our battery-powered portable devices.

“It’s a pretty safe, natural compound,” Seferos adds. “If you wanted to, you could actually eat the source material it comes from.”

B2’s ability to be reduced and oxidized makes its well-suited for a lithium ion battery.

“B2 can accept up to two electrons at a time,” says Seferos. “This makes it easy to take multiple charges and have a high capacity compared to a lot of other available molecules.”

A step to greener electronics

“It’s been a lot of trial-and-error,” says Schon. “Now we’re looking to design new variants that can be recharged again and again.”

While the current prototype is on the scale of a hearing aid battery, the team hopes their breakthrough could lay the groundwork for powerful, thin, flexible, and even transparent metal-free batteries that could support the next wave of consumer electronics.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Bio-Derived Polymers for Sustainable Lithium-Ion Batteries by Tyler B. Schon, Andrew J. Tilley, Colin R. Bridges, Mark B. Miltenburg, and Dwight S. Seferos. Advanced Functional Materials DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201602114 Version of Record online: 14 JUL 2016

© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

Took a look at nano vitamin webcast

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There was an event called Nanotech and Your Daily Vitamins based on a newly released report called A Hard Pill to Swallow January 14, 2009, at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN). The event has been posted as a webcast. I watched it a few weeks ago and finally got a chance to review the report today. The most disconcerting thing about the affair is how little information anyone has about nanoscale ingredients in dietary supplements and the speed at which these products are proliferating. From the report’s introduction,

[When we started] there were 11 dietary supplements on the market that claimed to use nanoscale ingredients, such as calcium, magnesium and silver. Now less than two years later, our research has found indications that the number of manufacturer-identified dietary supplementary products claiming to use nanoscale ingredients has more than tripled to over 40 products.

I imagine that not every manufacturer wants to admit that they’re using nanoscale ingredients (so it makes me wonder how many more of these products there are) or even agrees that the ingredients should be considered as something unique. As a matter of fact, in a report of this kind I’d expect to see a definition for what constitutes a nanoscale ingredient. Overall, the report and the webcast where the authors discussed their findings were a disappointment to me. My impression is that the authors did not have a good grasp of the topic. If you’re curious about their findings and their recommendations, you can find the report and the webcast here, just click in the sidebar on the right.

Nano vitamins, honey bee mystery, and a history of risk

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The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has an event tomorrow, Jan. 14 2009 from 9:30 am to 10:30 am EST (with a 6:30 am PST start time, I think I’ll wait ’til they post the webcast). If you want to see the webcast (Nanotech and Your Daily Vitamins) live or, if you’re planning to attend,  RSVP, go here. This seems more like a press conference than one of their standard events given the time and the planned distribution post webcast of a report on food supplement regulation as per nanotechnology innovations.

Genome BC has a free public forum coming up on January 20, 2009 (next Tuesday). It’s called ‘Why are Bees Disappearing and Could Poplar Trees be the Next Biofuel?’  There are speakers from the University of British Columbia and one from the BC Innovation Council.  Location is: Science World, 1455 Quebec St., Vancouver and the time is: 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Go here for more details and for pre-registration.

I found an interesting aggregator, Allport, which offers amongst other topics a nanotechnology page listing ‘All the top nanotechnology news’ from various blogs. Go here for a look. Allport describes itself as: a “digital magazine rack of the internet” (from their About Allport page).

After noticing yesterday’s kerfuffle (in Canadian media) about risk, regulation, and nanotechnology, I decided to take another look at that report, ‘Small is different’ from the Council of Canadian Academies’. Here’s what they had to say in their summary,

Although the panel believes that it is not necessary to create new regulatory mechanisms to address the unique challenges presented by nanomaterials, existing regulatory mechanisms could and should be strengthened.  p. 9

(Arguably the regulatory mechanisms should be strengthened regardless of any innovations due to nanotechnology or other emerging technology.) In any event, it’s interesting to contrast the text in the report with the news items which suggest a more strident tone.

Nano events

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The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) has a couple of events coming up later this month. The first one is this coming Thurs., Jan. 8, 2009 ‘Synthetic Biology: Is Ethics A Showstopper? from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm EST. The event features two speakers, Arthur Caplan, an ethicist from the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Maynard, the chief science advisor for PEN. They request an RSVP, if you are attending in person. Go here for more details and/or to RSVP. Or you can view the webcast live or later. Their other event is on Weds.,  Jan. 14, 2009 and is called ‘Nanotech and Your Daily Vitamins’. The time for this event is 9:30 am – 10:30 am EST. The featured speakers, William B. Schultz and Lisa Barclay, are the authors of a report for PEN about the FDA and how it can address issues surrounding dietary supplements that use nanomaterials. For more details about the event and/or to RSVP, go here. There is also the webcast option. There is a link to the report from the event page but you have to log in to view it (as of Jan.6.09).

Nanotech BC is cancelling its Jan. 15, 2009 breakfast speaker event. Meanwhile, Nanotech BC organizers are preparing for the second Cascadia Symposium on April 20 – 21, 2009 at the Bayshore. They’ve gone for a larger venue (250 people) than last year’s. No other details are available yet.

Inspiration for a new approach to risk regulation for nanotechnology

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I’m getting into the home stretch now regarding the ‘Risk Management Principle for Nanotechnology’ article. After dealing with the ‘classic’ risk principles and the newer precautionary principles, the authors (Marchant, Sylvester, and Abbott) unveil a theory for their proposed ‘new principles’. The theory is based on work by I. Ayres and J. Braithwaite on something they call, ‘Responsive Regulation’. Briefly, they suggest avoiding the regulation/deregulation debate in favour of a flexible regulatory approach where a range of strategies are employed.

With this tool kit [range of strategies] in hand, regulators can play a tit-for-tat strategy: they allow firms to self-regulate so long as the firms reciprocate with responsible action; if instead some firms act opportunistically, regulators respond to the defectors with appropriate penalties and more stringent regulation. p. 52 (Nanoethics, 2008, vol. 2 pp. 43-60

There are some difficulties associated with this approach but that is being saved for my next posting in this series.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has two events coming up. ‘Synthetic Biology: Is Ethics a Showstopper?’ on Thursday, January 8, 2009 from 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm (EST). For information on location (you have to RSVP) or how to attend via webcast (no RSVP required), check here. The other event is called, ‘Nanotech and Your Daily Vitamins; Barriers to Effective FDA Regulation of Nanotechnology-Based Dietary Supplements’ and will be held on Thursday, January 15 (?) from 9:30 am – 10:30 am (EST). The date listed on their website and in their invitation is January 14, which is incorrect. I imagine they’ll correct either the date or date soon. For more details about the event itself, the physical location (If you’re planning to go, please RSVP), or the webcast directions (RSVP) not required) please check here.