A new use for Brown scientist’s technology: Removable tattoos

Edith Mathiowitz has spent most of her professional career developing expertise in encapsulating proteins, genes and drugs, primarily for medical purposes.
She specializes in using polymers to encapsulate the substances because they have a very high molecular weight and can retain a substance for a long period of time. That makes them great for drugs that require a controlled release.
But Mathiowitz, a professor of medical science and engineering at Brown University, had never used her research to develop products outside the medical field until a company called Freedom-2, based in New York City, approached her with a unique task.
The company asked her to encapsulate tattoo ink in polymers to create the first durable removable tattoo.
“At first, I was skeptical,” Mathiowitz said. “I was not sure how my colleagues would react.”
But after presenting the project to staff at Brown, they embraced it, she said. She began working on the project four years ago, and this month, Freedom-2 signed a licensing agreement with the university to use the process to make tattoos.
Mathiowitz has developed a way to encapsulate molecules in each pigment to capture laser light particularly well, so when a laser is applied to remove the ink, it can be removed in as little as one or two treatments. Normal tattoos can take six to eight laser treatments, she said. The technology, therefore, makes the tattoo less costly to remove.
Also, the technology makes the tattoo safer, because the polymers prevent the ink from leaching out into lymph nodes, which can cause toxicity.
Though Freedom-2 wouldn’t give the exact amount of funding it has provided for research at Brown, the company’s president and CEO Martin Schmieg said its total research and development investment to date is about $3.5 million.
The funds have paid for all overhead costs to operate a 12- to 20-person lab involving undergraduates, graduate students, a technician and a postdoctoral student.
Mathiowitz said projects like this show that company-sponsored research is a good model for raising funds for universities, especially at a time when National Institutes of Health grants are so difficult to get.
“The funding I get supports my lab,” she said. “It supports the graduate students. They are getting experience. Companies just take them.”
Schmieg said businesses should recognize and embrace these kinds of arrangements more as well. Brown has been professional and easy to work with, he said, and now his company is looking at “a host of medical applications” for the technology that could yield additional licensing opportunities.
Freedom-2 incorporated in 1999. The first four years mostly involved theorizing about the type of technology and type of intellectual protection the product would need, he said.
Freedom-2 found out about Mathiowitz through a contact at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and contacted her because “there are very, very few leading scientists in the field of polymers in the United States,” Schmieg said.
Since the licensing agreement emerged, Mathiowitz said, she has gotten inquiries from other companies interested in polymer coating applications.
“It’s interesting because I definitely wouldn’t think they would approach me [on their own],” she said. “They put two and two together.”
Because Mathiowitz has the knowledge to encapsulate almost any kind of materials, the applications are practically endless, she said.