Scientific dedication unlocks secret of youth

JINAN, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Hyaluronic acid (HA) is the beauty industry's latest superstar to promise younger looks with better skin hydration, fewer wrinkles and restoring facial contours.

Known as the "key to Fountain of Youth," it is also injecting youth and vitality to the biotech industry in east China's Shandong Province, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the global raw HA market.

China has been encouraging sci-tech innovation to drive the economy and Bloomage Biotech, a major HA producer in Shandong, is a typical beneficiary of technological progress.

In Jinan High-tech Development Zone, Bloomage Biotech and Shandong Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences are neighbors and pioneers in China's HA industry.

HA is widely and naturally present in all living organisms. It plays an essential physiological role in the human body, such as facilitating pain-free movement in the joints and supporting the round shape of the eye.

It is also a powerful natural moisturizer as it can bind with water over one thousand times its own weight. An adult weighing 75 kg only has 15 grams of HA in the body, and the content will gradually diminish with age.

Before the application of biofermentation, HA was mainly extracted from rooster combs. In the 1970s, extracting 1 kg of HA needed rooster combs from more than 20,000 roosters.

HA products on the Chinese market were previously mostly imported. The price of 1 kg of medical-grade HA was once about 1 million yuan. The situation was reversed through independent innovation.

In the early 1990s, Guo Xueping was a researcher at Shandong Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He and his colleagues unlocked the technology of biofermentation, which enables large-scale HA production, dramatically reduces the costs, and makes China a significant producer of HA raw materials.

Chief scientist at Bloomage since 2000, Guo told Xinhua that Bloomage now exports HA products to more than 40 countries and regions, accounting for more than half of the global market.

Bloomage products cover all categories, from food-grade HA priced at 2 yuan (about 0.3 U.S. dollars) per gram to medical-grade HA for tumor-targeting drugs priced at 500,000 yuan per gram.

The discovery that enzymes could cut HA molecules established Bloomage's market-leading position. Large HA molecules just sit on top of the skin and provide hydration only at the surface. Smaller HA molecules can penetrate deeper. So a product containing HA molecules in different sizes offers maximum hydration.

"Bloomage is the only company in the world that can control the HA molecular weight from 2k Da to 4,000k Da," said Guo.

Dalton (Da) is the unit of molecular weight. The molecular weight of water is 18 Da.

In 2019, biofermentation productivity at Bloomage was about 12 to 14 grams per liter, double that of most foreign counterparts, said Guo.

During the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), the company plans to introduce advanced biotechnologies such as synthetic biology and gene editing to select bacteria for biofermentation.

In an interview with Xinhua-run Shanghai Security News, Bloomage CEO Zhao Yan said that to develop products respected by the international market, innovation must be verified and refined repeatedly in the lab.

For 20 years, Bloomage Biotech just did one thing, said Zhao: "We studied HA and made it the best in the world."