April 2026 • Vol. 32 • Issue 4
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Knowledge is Power: Creating a Database of Reconstructed Oral Tissue Model Applications for Personal Care Industry and Beyond …Megan Creelman and Gertrude-Emilia Costin
he personal care industry is an ever-expanding field of products that come into contact with our mouths daily, such as lipsticks, toothpastes, mouth-washes, and whitening products.1,2 With a multitude of new products being released each year, how are they all being evaluated for consumer safety? One option that has become increasingly popular is that of 3D (threedimensional) reconstructed human tissue models.3 These models are comprised of layered, differentiated cells intended to replicate various phenotypes of human tissue, thus making them relevant for replicating the response of native tissues to various types of products topically applied. While some academic laboratories are creating such tissues in-house, not all are equipped to handle large-scale productions, and as such there are a few companies that provide these tissues commercially.4 As an easily scalable platform for toxicity testing, it is crucial to be aware of all the applications for such tissue models to avoid the unnecessary or premature use of expensive, time-consuming, or potentially unethical animal or human testing. This is what prompted us to compile a comprehensive database of academic sources discussing all manner of use cases for one such category of tissue models. We primarily focused on commercially available models given their production under strict manufacturing conditions that make them standardized, reliable, and in some cases validated test systems generated within established, acceptable biological performance ranges.
n Tissue Models and Providers
The tissue production process has been optimized commercially for a wide variety of phenotypes, including but not limited to dermal, ocular, buccal, gingival, and vaginal tissue models. Each phenotype has a plethora of use cases to be found in the safety testing of personal care products; however, we chose to focus solely on those models most relevant to oral applications—buccal and gingival. For these two phenotypes there are several commercial providers (Table 1), of which two might be considered primary suppliers of these tissues based on the considerable number of published peer-reviewed papers or posters captured in our database: EpiSkin (Lyon, France) and MatTek Corporation, now part of Sartorius (Ashland, MA, USA). EpiSkin produces the (continued on Page 4)
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y S Y M P O S I U M • A P R I L 2 3 r d ...see pages 10-13 for more information.