L’Oréal teams up with National University of Singapore for longevity science research lab
The partners aim to expand the understanding of skincare from a primarily cosmetic function to one connected with broader health and ageing biology.
SINGAPORE – L’Oréal Groupe has entered into a multi-year strategic research partnership with the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, to investigate the relationship between skin health and the body’s ageing process.
The collaboration combines L’Oréal’s more than 115 years of expertise in skin and hair science with NUS Medicine’s research capabilities in geroscience, healthy longevity and precision geromedicine.
As part of the agreement, the partners have established a joint laboratory at NUS Medicine’s Healthy Longevity Clinical Trial Centre.
The research will examine whether changes in the skin, scalp and hair can provide meaningful information about how other organs and bodily systems age.
Professor Andrea Maier, Oon Chiew Seng Professor in Medicine, Healthy Ageing and Dementia Research at NUS Medicine and founder and director of the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity, said, “Our strategic partnership with L’Oréal enables us to integrate state-of-the-art skin assessments into our clinical trials, alongside systemic measures of biological ageing across multiple organ systems.”
“This will allow us to better understand how skin reflects and contributes to healthy ageing within the context of the system ageing within persons.”
Although skin is the body’s largest and most accessible organ, it has not traditionally been assessed with the same level of scientific detail applied to other systems in multi-organ ageing research.
The L’Oréal-NUS partnership is intended to address this gap by examining whether skin ageing mirrors changes occurring elsewhere in the body or develops independently.
The new laboratory is located on the NUS Medicine campus and operates within the Healthy Longevity Clinical Trial Centre under the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity.
L’Oréal’s skin, scalp and hair assessment technologies have been incorporated into the centre’s broader clinical research processes.
Skin evaluations already form part of the Academy’s trial protocols, but the co-location of the laboratory will allow researchers to examine participants’ skin alongside cardiovascular, metabolic, cognitive and musculoskeletal indicators.
Collecting these measurements from the same individuals and within the same research protocols will allow the teams to compare skin data directly with systemic health indicators.
The partnership will conduct collaborative longevity studies and clinical trials to investigate how skin health may contribute to quality of life and overall healthy ageing.
The work will also explore the possibility that skin, scalp and hair characteristics could reveal changes taking place at cellular and molecular levels.
Research findings will contribute to L’Oréal’s Longevity Integrative Science™ programme, which seeks to strengthen the scientific links between skin biology and systemic ageing.
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