Development of Hyalo-Oligo®
Motivation for development
I think I started this development in my second year with the company. I was very motivated to try and create a type of Hyaluronic acid that hadn't existed before. At the time, the prevailing view was that if it were Hyaluronic acid, it must be high-molecular weight, and the higher the molecular weight, the better. So it was the sparking of my interest in what conversely might be the case for low-molecular weight Hyaluronic acid that led this development.
Development challenges
It was hard to achieve an understanding of the benefits of non-viscous Hyaluronic acid and low-molecular weight Hyaluronic acid. In pre-production interviews with customers, even though they understood the possibility of Hyalo-Oligo®, we got a lot of comments to the effect that they could not imagine how to use it. They gave us all sorts of advice about data we should obtain more of. We would visit a customer to introduce the product and come back with ideas they gave us; we were learning every time we visited customers.
Where to from here
Basically, our insistence was on an original Hyaluronic acid that is different from anything else that had come before. As well as Hyaluronic acid itself, we also departed from the conventional in getting functionality data. That was because it would mean nothing if we came up with something that negated high-molecular weight Hyaluronic acid. We developed the product with the vision always that it could be used in parallel with conventional products because it had a different moisture retention mechanism than the rest.
