You only need to watch prime time TV for about 10 minutes to realize that fighting acne has become a big business. The world’s top music and movie stars can be seen nightly touting their triumph over acne-cursed lives, and the products that saved them. In this weeks issue of New Biotechnology, Ashby et al. claim that over $100 million is spent annually in the USA, on anti-acne formulas. The authors of this paper describe a new means of delivering antimicrobial compounds called sophorolipids (SLs) to the bacterium Propionibacterium acnes, the gram positive faculative anaerobe generally responsible for causing acne.<\/b><\/p>\n
The new delivery system consists of biopolymer matrices as a delivery system for topical applications of SLs. SLs are sugar-based (containing the disaccharide sophorose) biomolecules that are non-toxic to humans, despite showing antibacterial activity to different classes of organisms, depending on the addition of different ligands and structural analogue form. Four formulas were tested, poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), PHB-co-10%-3-hydroxyhexanoate (PHB\/HHx), pectin and alginate. The former two worked best but created a more opaque film than pectin and alginate, which makes the latter better suited for application to the facial areas.<\/p>\n