New preservative from your eyes?

Here’s an interesting story about a technology that could be the future of preservation for cosmetics.  According to researchers, they’ve discovered a compound in the eye that has an anti-microbial effect.

The material is a keratin protein fragment that was demonstrated to ward off a number of disease-causing bacteria.  And since it is derived from keratin proteins, it’s likely that the product will have low toxicity.  Of course, formaldehyde is produced naturally in the body  and that doesn’t really make affect its toxicity, so I don’t know how much faith I put in the claims of low toxicity.  Testing will have to be done.

But it’s an interesting technology.  Keratin fragments may be a whole new class of anti-microbials.  I wouldn’t look for this to be available any time soon though.  The research comes out of Academia which is notoriously bad at bringing products to the market.