Zebrafish has been used in environmental toxicological evaluation since the 30s of the 20th century, and has been widely used in life sciences, medicine, drug research and development, ecological environmental toxicology evaluation and nutrition and health food research and development, and has issued a series of domestic and foreign technical guidelines and standards. With the issuance and implementation of a series of regulatory regulations and systems such as the Regulations on the Supervision and Administration of Cosmetics in 2021, China's cosmetics industry has entered a period of innovation-driven high-quality development. Due to its own biological characteristics and long-term research accumulation in basic scientific and technological methods, zebrafish began to attract attention from the cosmetics industry and was increasingly widely used.
The skin structure and function of zebrafish are highly similar to those of the human body, with a short experimental cycle, high experimental efficiency and low experimental cost. In addition, zebrafish technology complies with the International 3R Principles for Animal Welfare, and zebrafish in early development (within 5 days of fertilization) are exempt from cosmetic experiments. At present, zebrafish technology in the cosmetics industry is mainly used for: general cosmetics efficacy filing testing and verification, special cosmetics efficacy verification before human testing, formula screening and efficacy verification, raw material efficacy and safety screening and mechanism research. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 800 cosmetics companies that use zebrafish technology for raw material and product research and development, and dozens of zebrafish laboratories that carry out cosmetic efficacy and safety evaluation experiments. However, at present, the application of zebrafish in cosmetic raw materials and product research and development varies greatly, and there is a lack of relevant expert consensus.
In order to promote the further development and improvement of zebrafish technology and better play the role and value of zebrafish technology under the new regulatory system of the cosmetics industry, the first "Zebrafish Technology Application Seminar in Cosmetics R&D" was held in Shanghai on August 18, 2023. The seminar was hosted by Baiyun Meiwan International Research Institute Cluster and Oriental Meigu Group, co-organized by Huante Biotech and Guangzhou Baiyun Meiwan Testing Co., Ltd., and attended by more than 50 experts in the fields of cosmetics research and development, dermatology, zebrafish research, and cosmetics regulations, and conducted in-depth discussions on the application of zebrafish technology in cosmetics research and development, and formed 5 expert consensuses for the application of zebrafish technology for practical reference——
Zebrafish technology provides a new method for cosmetics R&D with short experimental cycle, low experimental cost and intuitive results, which is a supplement to the existing cosmetics R&D technology system, and has good complementarity with human experiments and cell experiments.
Zebrafish technology can be used for efficacy filing detection and verification of ordinary cosmetics, efficacy verification of special cosmetics, screening and efficacy verification of formulas, screening of raw materials and mechanism research, etc., which is worthy of further promotion.
From the perspective of zebrafish technology to help the development of the cosmetics industry, zebrafish experimental exploration should be encouraged, the correspondence of efficacy evaluation indicators between in vitro experiments and human experiments and the transformation of experimental results should be strengthened, research and transformation of alternative methods for zebrafish safety evaluation should be encouraged, so as to consolidate the scientific foundation of zebrafish technology application and further enhance the application value of zebrafish technology in cosmetics research and development.
Strengthen the research of zebrafish skin health-related pathways and targets at the molecular and cellular levels, give full play to the transparent characteristics of zebrafish larvae, and use gene editing and other technologies to develop zebrafish models and methods that can visualize the targeted effect, so as to better facilitate the research and development of new raw materials;
It is necessary to accelerate the standardization of zebrafish technology, including the standardization of feeding conditions and genetic quality, the standardization of efficacy and safety evaluation experimental methods, improve the comparability of data between laboratories, and lay a good foundation for the regulatory and technical acceptance of this technology.
