Living Proof Goes for the Perfect Hair Day

Living Proof says it has combined its proprietary technologies into a new product launching today that “breaks new ground in hair care and is expected to form the cornerstone of a new multi-million dollar franchise.” The product is called Perfect Hair Day (PHD): 5-in-1 Styling Treatment.
 
OFPMA— proprietary moisture controlling molecular shield—has been co-formulated with another proprietary Living Proof molecule for microscopic hair thickening, PBAE, to create Perfect Hair Day (PHD): 5-in-1 Styling Treatment. This new product delivers five benefits, a combination of styling and treatment in one formula—which the firm is billing as a  “feat which has been impossible to do with the established hair care ingredients of the last 30 years.”
 
PBAE is the acronym for PolyBetaAminoEster. MIT has numerous patents on PBAEs and much of their research has focused within the biotechnology field, in particular related to drug delivery. Living Proof, in its work with MIT, identified potential for harnessing this technology and re-engineering these materials to build larger polymers that can act as hair thickeners and volumizers. Living Proof has also been awarded specific patents for the PBAE polymers used by the company.
 
 “When you’re willing to go out of the box and really invest in groundbreaking scientific discovery – creating entirely new ingredients that have never before been used in beauty – there is obviously big risk. But with that comes big reward,” said Jill Beraud, CEO of Living Proof. “With these new patents and the anticipated return of our new franchise, it is clear that there is huge value in our science.”
 
“The science taking place at Living Proof is special because, instead of following the traditional formula within the hair and skin care industry, the company follows a model we knew worked well for driving innovation — the biotech industry,” explains Dr. Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Living Proof is built around the scientific principle I’ve always believed in: that if you can find the root cause of the problem, you can solve it. The company is also bringing the most modern and advanced technologies, such as novel material designs and high throughput technologies, to apply to the problems in hair and skin care, and the patents we have received are evidence of the innovation we’ve achieved so far.”
 
Living Proof also announced that it received three Notices of Allowance and one issued patent related to its innovative hair care products.  Issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office, the three notices of allowance for patents expand Living Proof’s proprietary technology around OFPMA, which is designed to weightlessly smooth, condition, strengthen, polish and extend the quality and appearance of styled hair.
 
The new patent, “Coloring Agents and Methods of Use Thereof” (U.S. Patent No. 8,444,715, covers a hair coloring innovation in Living Proof’s pipeline. The hair coloring innovation brings together for the first time two properties that have historically been a tradeoff in hair color products: color brilliance and durability. The claims of this new issued patent are directed to novel dye compositions. In a similar way that molecules are combined for innovative drugs and other molecular structures, the claimed dye compounds in Living Proof’s technology contain three parts: a chromophore which is responsible for the color of the dye; a color-fastness moiety, which is responsible for binding the dye compound to hair; and a linker, which connects the chromophore to the color-fastness moiety, according to the firm.
 
“Our scientists are discovering proprietary technologies inspired by biomedical research, and bringing this innovation to hair care,” said Eric Spengler, SVP of R&D for Living Proof. “We are applying scientific principles to enable the development of novel products that enable new and improved properties for strong, healthy hair. These new patents just build on our already strong patent estate which includes our Poly (beta-amino ester) compounds developed using high-throughput processes and technology originating from MIT.”