Hard cell

FOR years, every other cream that claims to be "innovative" and comes with an astronomical price tag has boasted some form of stem cell technology; even if the concentration of stem cell matter in it is about as high as Donald Trump's EQ. The truth is, there isn't any beauty cream on the market that contains even a drop of the precious ingredient that is usually derived either from embryos or various tissues of a mammal.

But that doesn't mean that stem cells, known for their self-renewal abilities, exist only as a buzzword in skincare. While aesthetics doctors have in the past received slaps on the wrists for administering stem cell injections that have not met the standards of evidence-based medicine, or multi-level marketers have touted placenta supplements to regenerate ageing skin, a local company has finessed breakthrough science into the area of beauty.

The two-year-old Calecim brand of products developed for medical professionals and regular skincare addicts has based its lean range of cosmetics on the breakthroughs by its parent biomedical company Cellresearch Corporation. Over a decade ago, the group's chief executive officer Gavin Tan had shared the placenta and umbilical cord from his wife after she had just given birth with his company's co-founder Dr Phan Toan Thang, who is also an associate professor at the department of surgery at the National University of Singapore's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, for research purposes. While the latter, who is now the group's chief scientific officer, did not manage to salvage much useful matter from the placenta, which was contaminated after being handled by several medical personnel, he was astonished to discover a large amount of stem cells within the cord lining membrane - a yield of over a billion such cells, to be exact.