Olivier Peschard, Research Manager Chemistry, Croda Beauty
Frédéric De Baene, Research Director, Croda Beauty
Performance and sustainability are key consumer beliefs in personal care, thus the renewed interest for hero ingredients like peptides and keratin. Performance being demonstrated, our attention now shifts to improving sustainability of these ingredients? We have chosen to focus our efforts on their manufacturing mode to reduce their impact on the environment.
Two technologies are helping drive this evolution: Group Assisted Purification Peptide Synthesis, or GAP-PS, and synthetic biology. Together, they show how peptide innovation is becoming not only more effective, but also more sustainable, precise, and scalable.
GAP-PS is a smarter and greener way to manufacture bioactive peptides. It combines the strengths of solid-phase peptide synthesis and liquid-phase peptide synthesis while avoiding some of the limits of both traditional routes. In conventional peptide manufacturing, production often relies on petrochemical-derived solvents, generates significant organic waste, and may require long processing times. GAP-PS aims to simplify this process by improving solubility control, increasing yield, reducing solvent use, and making purification easier.
A key feature of GAP-PS is the GAP anchor, which helps control the solubility of the peptide during synthesis. This improves the peptide’s behavior in the reactor, makes separations faster, and can even allow longer peptides to be produced more efficiently. This one-pot technology supports high-concentration reactions, minimal excess reagents, and high crude purity, while reducing solvent use and waste by up to 80%. GAP-PS can also eliminate the need for chromatography and lyophilization in some processes, which makes the overall manufacturing route simpler, faster, and lower-impact.
The sustainability benefits are central to the way GAP-PS is positioned. This method can deliver a major reduction in process mass intensity, with a much lower environmental footprint than standard solid-phase synthesis. It is also free from CMR and TFA reagent, which is important for both regulatory and environmental reasons. In this sense, GAP-PS is not just a technical improvement; it is a manufacturing platform designed to meet the cosmetic industry’s growing need for cleaner, more responsible ingredient production.
From sustainability to delivery, discover our latest peptide innovation: Matrixyl® Neolide™, smart science makes it better, faster, stronger
Once the microorganism is engineered, it acts as a living factory (figure 2). Under carefully controlled culture conditions, it produces the target sequence with high reproducibility and traceability. The biomass is then harvested and processed through downstream steps such as extraction, purification, solubilization, and preservation. This approach supports industrial scale-up, including volumes of 6,000 liters and beyond, while maintaining consistency and product quality.
Figure 2: Keratin production using synthetic biology
One of the strongest advantages of synthetic biology is precision. Because the final molecule can be designed to match a human sequence, it offers biomimetic performance and high compatibility with hair or skin biology. This route reduces land use, avoids animal origin, reduces solvent use, and improves reproducibility. In cosmetic applications, this can be especially valuable for ingredients that are difficult or impossible to obtain through traditional sourcing.
KeraBio K31 is an example of what synthetic biology can achieve. This keratin-based ingredient is a human-hair-identical protein created through synthetic biology, with intact active sites and strong repair performance. It is a highly potent and sustainable alternative to animal-derived keratin, illustrating how biotechnology can deliver both functional benefits and environmental progress.
