The environmental impact of nanotechnology is the cause of much debate – some of it quite heated. Are nanoparticles dangerous – will nanobots prey on our bodies as well as our minds, and how long before the Earth is overrun with grey goo? Well, we simply don’t know. The extreme visions of a famed novelist and a future king may not be the best indicators, but a lot more research needs to be done before we can even start answering such questions.
I was intrigued (and a little amazed), therefore, to read a recent article by Bethany Halford in Chemical and Engineering News about the use of buckminsterfullerene (C-60) in cosmetics. As she points out, there is some evidence that C-60 might not be the benign little soccer ball we all know and love.
I decided to visit the website of one C-60-containing product, Zelens Day Cream, and see what they had to say for themselves:
Zelens creams uniquely contain Fullerene C60, an extremely powerful anti-oxidant, for which its three discoverers received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997.
Hum… it was actually 1996, but who’s counting?
In the pharmaceutical industry, Fullerene C60 is expected to play a major part in the fight against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Aids and many other diseases in which oxidation plays an important role.
A universal cure-all? Is there anything “Fullerene C60” can’t do? Seriously now, just how much of an impact is C60 making in the pharmaceutical industry? Has the early hype turned into future hope? I didn’t think it had, but please, let me know if I’m wrong about this…
The creams arise out of Dr Lens’ extensive research in the field of skin cancer, reflected in the many papers by him published in leading medical journals.
A search on Thomsons’ ISI Web of Science for Dr Marko B Lens indicates that he has published 16 papers.
Anyway, I’m not likely to become acquainted with this product, because at more than 130 GBP for a 30 mL jar, I couldn’t face it. How about you?
Stuart
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
Maybe I’ve been looking at the wrong therapeutic areas, but speaking as a medicinal chemist, I haven’t seen a single application of C60 to pharmaceuticals over the last ten years.
I am shocked to see skin care creams containing C60!
I have worked with C60 and we take utmost care not to touch it or inhale it.
The product and the advt. should be checked thoroughly by the concerned authorities.
What a hoax!
Revathi Bacsa
Revathi – it must be safe – the blurb says it’s natural and as pure as diamond. Surely that’s pretty much a guarantee that it’ll be fine for you, right?
Like pure, natural strychnine…
Seriously. Weak. I mean, anti-oxidant? I’ve seen efforts to add transition metals to bucky balls for therapeutic reasons, but alone? And what redox chemistry would they be relying on? What a total waste.
Amazing what cosmetic companies come up with to lure customers.
I found a face-cream with “nanosomes” – presumably liposome-like compounds, but much much smaller.
I was contacted recently by some women (I have my own web page on fullerenes) who asked me if it worth to pay so much money for C60 cream. The advertisement looks really strange, especially in the point about very high cost: it was written that C60 is more expensive than gold. Finally I found where legend was born: Mitsubishi got a patent on some C60 compounds which could serve as antioxidants. Not pure fullerene C60! What were those inventors of skin cream using nobody knows…
Some people messed it up completely. Finally, some water soluble derivatives of C60 were recently reported dangerous for health.
Alexandr,
Do you have more information on these C60 compounds? Were they filled C60s? That would explain their high cost.
Revathi
P.S. The chemsistry of the antioxidant activity is the fact that fullerenes are essentially strained alkenes. They are not aromatic, and so the 30 double bonds, with the driving force of the strain, do addition chemistry with the radicals. Very similar to the carotenoids, but of course with a larger number of double bonds, and the added driving force of the strain of the curvature.
In addition to this high stoichiometry, they react with virtually any radical, and once creating the first addition product, they do-localize the radical, giving a very stable, un-reactive radical product, but of course the next radical addition, which preferentially occurs at an adjacent carbon to the previously reacted carbon, pairs the electron, and so magically, they really do neutralize free radicals, which even most biological antioxidants do not.
It was this basic feature of their chemistry that gave rise to the term radical sponge, and this is very well established, you can pick up any introductory fullerene chemistry text to find this.
I have also been working with C60 for years, and to everyone I know it is accepted as pretty benign – you don’t worry at all about getting on your hands for example.
As to the substance behind the Zelens, there is actually a lot of scientific support for the antioxidant activity and safety. Notably, the fact that Merck licensed a water soluble C60 derivative in 2003 for continued study as a neurological antioxidant. There are literally dozens of patents and applications on the use of C60 compounds as antioxidants, and dozens more on the antioxidant activity. This all began at DuPont in about 1991 – where they showed the enormous capacity of a C60 to soak up fullerenes, and they coined the phrase “radical sponge” at that time. Not shoddy science, and it has been verified over and over again by leading scientists in peer-reviewed publications.
Mitsubishi has also been intensively studying the safe application of C60 compounds as antioxidants, and formed a company in Japan, Vitamin C60 Bioresearch, to market fullerene-containing skincare formulations. They’ve been doing quite well. They also have published several peer-reviewed articles on the safety.
So, knowing the literature quite well on the physiological application of C60 compounds – there is beyond the shadow of a doubt a great potential for the use of C60 as a safe antioxidant (a lot of toxicity data is out there), and believe it or not, Zelens is not the only product out there. Several more already exist in addition to Mitsubishi.
As to the recent Rice work, it is a travesty since they studied not C60 but 10 – 20 nm particles of C60, which has also been shown to have tetrahdrafuran inclusions which could have caused their observed oxidation of cell walls. A very recent publication from Japan duplicated their study using the same material as used in the Rice study but without THF, and they observed no adverse toxicity.
Whether Zelens or Mitsubishi actually have enough fullerenes in their product to actually do anything beneficial (or to be worth the money) is a different question, and I can’t vouch for either product.
By the way, the going price for pure C60 is about $25/g – just a shade higher than gold.
Sorry – typo in my previous post – should read “enormous capacity of a C60 to soak up radicals”