This Innovate UK-funded project, conducted jointly by Unilever and the Royce Institute at the University of Manchester (UoM), aims to mechanistically understand the impact of personal care products on skin at the molecular level. Unilever is one of the biggest Beauty & Personal care companies in the world, with a broad and diverse portfolio of brands, e.g. Dove, Rexona, Vaseline, Lifebuoy, Signal, serving billions of consumers across the globe. The personal care product market represents a £multi-billion global industry and includes formulations across categories such as oral care, deodorant, and skin. These personal care products allow maintenance of hygiene, better health and confidence for our consumers. To design superior products for our consumers, such products often require high level chemistry and analysis of complex biological environments. As an example, axillary malodour is driven by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including fatty acids, thioalcohols and steroids, which are all by-products of the microbial transformation of odourless precursor molecules from the apocrine gland on human skin. The generated VOCs are challenging molecules to sample and analyse, as they are highly volatile and unstable, leading to loss of valuable information. The existing methods do not provide a complete understanding of the molecules necessary for designing studies aimed at enhancing the efficacy of our products. By quantifying these VOCs as they are naturally produced by human skin, we can develop targeted products tailored to specific skin types. This collaborative project with experts from The Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry at the University of Manchester, a leader in cutting-edge analytical techniques including Triple Quad Mass Spectrometry and Gas Chromatography--Thermal Desorption and experts within this field, aims to enhance our understanding of product modes of action and improve product efficacy. We have identified a collaboration with the Royce Institute, renowned for its specialised expertise within VOC analysis. They will provide access to cutting-edge high-resolution instruments and scientific insights, enabling us to measure VOCs with greater sensitivity and enhance the precision of our data.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

This collaborative R&D project is aimed at the development of experimental and bioinformatic pipelines to accelerate the commercial application of metagenomic approaches. Currently, these are error-prone, slow and cumbersome. The developed tools will have wide applicability across many industry sectors and will radically alter approaches to microbial control, and facilitate the discovery of more efficacious, targeted and environmentally friendly biocides. The £2.3M TSB-funded project brings together a team of academic (Liverpool University, Centre for Genome Research and University of Glasgow) and commercial (Unilever, Skalene, Biocontrol) experts in microbiology, genomics, bioinformatics and instrumentation to develop robust, simple procedures and processes for determining and understanding the structure and functional capacity of microbial communities.

This project will provide the technical innovation to restructure large-scale and established supply chains for the purpose of significantly reducing emissions and packaging waste related to the distribution of raw materials, finished products and waste disposal from complex liquid products. The Feasibility project identified types of technical innovations for short, medium and long term implementation that could transform the supply chains of Unilever and ICI Paints and their associated environmental impact. Using an initial array of innovations including consumer driven in-store dispensing interfaces, regional factory miniaturisation and formulation compartmentalisation (capable of multiple product roll out) the project will then explore the possibility of radical product replacement and migration to service-based products with increasing capability to redraw emission and waste paradigms.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.