First anti-wrinkle pill shows signs of success

BEAUTY may be no more than skin-deep, but many of us think that leaves plenty of room for improvement. So a new dietary treatment that promises to shrink wrinkles from inside the skin is bound to be big news when it is launched next month.

The makers of the three-a-day capsules say they use blends of natural food extracts to activate genes that improve skin tone - and early results suggest they may be on the right track.

If the results stand up to scrutiny, the capsules will be the first anti-wrinkle treatment to show evidence of combating wrinkling from the deeper layers of skin. But they will not be the first to win scientific backing - some skin creams have been shown in peer-reviewed journals to help reduce wrinkles (British Journal of Dermatology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2133.2009.09436.x).

Independent researchers contacted by New Scientist said that the preliminary results are intriguing and commended the team developing the capsules for conducting a double-blind trial - testing them against a placebo with neither researchers nor recipients knowing until afterwards who had received what. They say they will be sceptical, however, until a peer-reviewed journal has published the results in full, and acknowledge that attempts to erase the signs of ageing don't sit well with everyone.

The "gene food" treatment is the work of John Casey's team at the laboratories of Unilever in Sharnbrook, UK. The multinational food, cosmetics and household products company commissioned four separate research groups to test the capsules, and 480 women in the UK, France and Germany who have passed the menopause took part in the trials.

New Scientist has seen results that show that in 14 weeks, "crow's feet" wrinkles by the corner of the eye became on average 10 per cent shallower in recipients of the capsules, shrinking by 30 per cent in the best responders (see photos). The wrinkles of women who received a placebo did not change significantly in depth.

In one of the two French studies, researchers also took 4-millimetre-deep biopsies from 110 women before and after treatment to study the production of collagen - a protein that is a key structural component of skin. Antibodies that stain tissue red where new collagen is produced revealed that after treatment a fifth of recipients had significantly more fresh collagen in the deepest skin layer - the dermis - than those who had received a placebo. More sensitive tests will be needed to ascertain any differences in the remaining biopsies, says Casey. Partial results were presented at the Society for Investigative Dermatology meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, last year; Casey says that the full data will now be sent to journals for peer review.

So how do these capsules work? As women age and oestrogen production drops off towards menopause, enzymes called proteases become more active, reducing the sponginess of skin by clearing away collagen faster than it can be replaced. An oestrogen receptor that aids the generation of collagen also becomes less active. The two effects combine to make skin less pliable and more wrinkly.

Casey's team used skin cultures and gene activity tests to ascertain the effect of certain natural food extracts on "master" genes, which orchestrate the behaviour of lots of other genes - in this case, those involved in collagen synthesis. The blend that activated these genes most strongly included vitamins C and E plus isoflavones from soya, lycopene from tomatoes and omega-3 polyunsaturated acids from fish oil (see "What's in an anti-wrinkle capsule?").

Unilever plans to launch the product next month in 44 spas that it co-owns in the UK, Spain and Canada. It does not need approval to sell the capsules from these countries' regulatory authorities because the extracts they contain are already in use and the company does not claim that the capsules benefit health.

Although long-term tests have not been carried out, Gail Jenkins, another member of the team, recommends taking three capsules per day for at least three months; at this dose, she says, adverse side effects are unlikely. If a person stopped taking the capsules, the normal ageing process would probably restore deeper wrinkles.

When New Scientist sent the preliminary data to independent dermatologists, they gave a guarded welcome. "The data are somewhat sparse, but they do appear to have done a pretty comprehensive study," says Christopher Griffiths, professor of dermatology at the University of Manchester, UK, and co-author of a 2009 study confirming that an anti-ageing cream produced by Boots, a British pharmacy chain, had anti-wrinkle effects (British Journal of Dermatology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2133.2009.09216.x). Griffiths said he would be "unconvinced" until he had seen all the data, but was intrigued by the apparent repair of deep rather than superficial wrinkles. "I know of no other study that has shown this before," he says. A likely explanation, says Casey, is that creams penetrate only the top layer of skin - the epidermis. The contents of the capsules, by contrast, reach the dermis, stimulating the production of collagen in deeper layers.

Richard Weller, a dermatologist at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, UK, applauded Unilever for testing the product against a placebo and for saying it will publish the results in full. "What matters is the clinical data, and they show there are reduced wrinkles in the treated group," he says. "I'm not aware of any [other] oral treatments that do this."

David Sarwer of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, says that the results are encouraging but "we need a number of studies in this area, with similar results and published in the peer-reviewed literature, before we have a sufficient body of evidence to suggest that these supplements positively impact facial appearance".

Nichola Rumsay of the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol says that anti-wrinkle capsules are more psychologically benign than facial surgery, but they still reinforce the message that wrinkles are bad. "We should be accepting wrinkles gracefully. Someone should develop a pill to stop people worrying about their appearance," she says. "That would make people a lot happier."

What's in an anti-wrinkle capsule?

The concept behind "gene foods" is to put back into modern diets the ingredients from berries, nuts and fruits that were abundant in the food of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Evidence is mounting that many of these ingredients have profound effects on master genes that keep tissue and organs healthy, reducing inflammation and damage.
Unilever's blend includes isoflavones from soya. These activate oestrogen receptors that trigger the skin to make collagen Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, DOI: 10.1016/s0273-2300(03)00091-6). Another ingredient in the capsules is omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids taken from fish oil, which activate a master gene called PPAR that is also involved in collagen synthesis (Journal of Lipid Research, DOI: 10.1194/jlr.m800614-jlr200).
The other ingredients are vitamin E, vitamin C and lycopene, all known to promote tissue health. "We put them all together in a single product, and there are about a dozen genetic mechanisms at work," says Casey.
Preliminary results from Unilever suggest that activating the master genes raises the activity of several other genes that make proteins vital for good skin tone, such as elastin, decorin and several anti-inflammatory molecules.