Hyaluronic acid(HA for short)is widely used in medical and cosmetic fields. In order to continuously adapt to market demand, hyaluronic acid has also undergone several technological upgrades. Nowadays, the preparation of hyaluronic acid includes animal tissue extraction method, microbial fermentation method, chemical synthesis method and other methods.
Because the cost of chemical synthesis is too high, it can only be synthesized in the laboratory at present, only for scientific research, and there is no problem of industrialization. At present, only the early animal tissue extraction method and the later microbial fermentation method can realize large-scale production and industrialization. These two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. The animal tissue extraction method is the beginning and plays a crucial role in the entire development of hyaluronic acid, but its weakness is high cost; the microbial fermentation method greatly reduces the cost and price of the product, breaking through After solving the technical problem of removing endotoxin, it has become the mainstream production process.
According to the production process of hyaluronic acid, it is divided into three categories: extraction from animal tissue, microbial fermentation, cross-linking and derivatization. At present, it can be divided into four stages: (1) The first stage hyaluronic acid is extracted from animal tissues, mainly from rooster comb, bull's eye, and pig's eye. The price is relatively expensive and the purity is not so high, but its application has a history of more than ten years. years ago accounted for a relatively large proportion; (2) The second stage of hyaluronic acid is extracted by microorganisms. Microbial extraction is first fermented, then purified, and then refined. It also took about ten years to develop and begin to be popularized and applied. It is the most primitive to replace the original animal tissue extraction. hyaluronic acid; (3) The third stage of hyaluronic acid is in the process of cosmetic application. It is found that the molecular weight is too large and the skin feel is not good, so it is cut into small molecules with enzymes, and then compounded; (4) The fourth stage of hyaluronic acid uses a special process to convert the original hyaluronic acid into a full molecular weight distribution, and then at each molecular energy node, it can find its corresponding proportion and how much content. Weight, so that when applying, it can be determined whether to use more small molecular weight or more large molecular weight, and different cosmetics can apply hyaluronic acid with different weights. In practice, it has been found that using hyaluronic acid with full molecular weight distribution as cosmetics has better effects than the previous versions.
In the future, there will be higher-end technologies and alternative methods, such as the method of using enzymes, and even the technology of cell factories, which can achieve higher yields and lower costs. The development of scientific research is never-ending, and the existence of each production technology has a certain necessity. In the long run, with the development of synthetic biology technologies such as gene editing and cell factories, the entire research on hyaluronic acid will continue. Go deeper. For consumers, products with lower prices and higher cost performance will be enjoyed in the future.