3-steps process
From skin to cells, and back to skin. AFI+™ goes from a skin biopsy taken at your clinic, send to our lab to grow fibroblast and sent back to the clinic for injection.
The first step of the AFI+™ process start with a small fragment of your skin.
The skin is chosen in an area that contains healthy cells, so it has to be from a non-sun-exposed and well vascularized part of the skin.
The dermatologist will often choose the back of the earlobe for this small biopsy (3mm) which correspond to these criteria and also have the advantage of being almost invisible. The biopsy is taken under local anesthesia, so the procedure is completely painless.
From your skin to skin cells, growing the healthiest fibroblasts in cell culture.
Once we receive the skin sample, our team will extract the fibroblasts from it. These cells will then be put in optimized culture condition which will select for the healthiest and fastest growing cells.
The culture is maintained until we obtain 40 to 50 million cells from the few hundreds we extracted from the skin. Once this number is reached (usually within 4 weeks), cells are prepared for injection. Cells can also be cryopreserved for a later injection, years later, using these younger cells.
Putting the cells back in your skin
The injections are usually for the whole face but can also be targeted to specific area, with about 40 to 50 millions cells injected in total. For an optimal result, fibroblasts must be injected in the dermis in multiple shallow injections. To achieve the best possible results, this injection are performed with Micronjet® microneedle device from NanoPass Technologies LTD, which will insure that all cels are injected into the dermis. This treatment can also be applied on hands, decolleté, or any other area of the skin that has suffer the damage of time.
The first results from injection are expected to appear in about 3 months to 4 months and improve more and more every month for about 6 months after the injection. AFI+™ being a true rejuvenation process of the skin, these results will last for years.
The main improvement in the AFI method that we provided is the possiblity to not only grow and inject your own cells but making sure that only the bestand youngest cells will be re-injected. This rejuvenation process is achieved during the culture of fibroblasts in the lab during which a strict selection of cells is done, together with optimal culture condition.
AFI is described in scientific literature for its efficiency as an anti-wrinkle treatment through numerous publications. One of the main limitation though is that the method of cell culture used until now require for about 3 month to reach 40 to 50 million cells. Our method allows us to reduce this time down to 4 weeks. This is part due to the strict selection of younger cells, which are known to devide faster and the optimized culture condition which allo the cells to grow to their full potential.
One of the main weak point of AFI treatment until now was also a sub-optimal method for injection. Injecting the fibroblast precisely inside the dermis is a complex task that depends on the skill of the dermatologist. In order to make sure that all the fibroblast will reach the dermis, we have partnered with world renowned expert in microinjection technology, NanoPass Technology. Their Micronjet device, which consist of 3 needles of 0,6mm long , is not only much more accurate for intradermal injection but also almost painless.