THE IIS UNIVERSITY

( deemed to be )

SESSION- 2021-22

SUBJECT : MACRO ECONOMIC THEORY – 1.

CODE : ATG – 514
SUBMITTED TO : DR. ITI GAUR
SUBMITTED BY : ANISHI GUPTA
B.COM(H) – HRG
IISU/2019/ADM/30764.

Report on Hand Sanitizers Is A Boom For Hand Moisturizers. This Start-up Has
A Solution For Both.
Hand sanitizers drying you out? This new fermented gel is better for your hands—and the
environment.

For many Americans, the first sign that a pandemic was coming happened at the grocery store.
The toilet paper aisle was suddenly empty. Then came the run on hand sanitizers, cleaning
supplies, gloves, and masks. As COVID-19 continues to squeeze much of the world, the supply
lines for many of these essential goods are still sputtering. In the US, N95 masks remain rare.
Hand sanitizer, on the other hand, is in stock. In some stores, it has even replaced candy and
gossip magazines at the checkout.
Regular use of hand sanitizer does keep the virus at bay, but it also wreaks havoc on the skin.
With overuse, your primary barrier to the gunk outside your body can become dried and even
cracked. The alcohol in hand sanitizer also obliterates most of the good microbes that are
supposed to live on your skin.natural products, may have hit on a solution to these stinging
hand sanitizer problems.
All hands on deck In the early days of the COVID pandemic, Visolis donated its small stockpile of
gloves and masks to Health RIGHT 360, a local healthcare non-profit. “I realized that there's
going to be a big, big shortage of this personal protective equipment,” says Deepak Dugar,
president of Visolis. “We even had a lot of alcohol on hand because we use that for our own
internal experiments. For all biology experiments, you need to sanitize everything around you.”
But in talking with the non-profit that received the supplies, Dugar discovered some issues.

“A few things were missing. One was that because these were coming in as donations, they were
coming in as big bottles or gallon jugs, or even bigger five-gallon pails. If you are a nurse
practitioner or a doctor, you can't be carrying those things around.”

“The second one, which was more interesting for me as a biochemist, was that this hand
sanitizer really dries out your hand because it has so much alcohol in it. In the lab, we typically
use gloves with hand sanitizer on top, so the alcohol never touches the skin. But most people
use hand sanitizer directly on the skin, and alcohol has a dehydrating effect.”
Brewing better solutions
Visolis is one of many companies that sees biology as the ultimate builder. Since learning about
the human genome project as a young man in India, Dugar has been motivated to integrate
biology into large-scale manufacturing. Shifting away from petrochemicals and towards better
biological solutions is vital to achieving a sustainable economy, he believes. Before COVID-19,
Visolis focused on fermenting a range of specialty goods for use in personal care to high-
performance, carbon-negative polymers.
“We had been working for the last four years on this ingredient, which boosts skin's hydration
level naturally. So, putting those two things together, [we created] a new moisturizing hand
sanitizer which is all plant-based,” said Dugar.The ingredient in question is mevalonic acid, or
mev acid. Visolis became interested in the compound years ago and had already worked out a
strategy for fermenting it in its lab in Hayward, California. “Just like a brewer would take sugars
and brew alcohol, we have developed a process to brew plant sugars into mev acid,” said Dugar.
Visolis partnered with a cosmetics supplier down the street who provided pocketable bottles
and filling lines. In weeks, the moisturizing hand sanitizer was out the door and in the hands
and pockets of frontline healthcare workers in the Bay Area.
Some of the nurses who received the first batches have expressed to Dugar that they want to
keep using it, and would even buy some for their friends and family going forward. Visolis is
now scaling up production.
Paul Petersen, vice president of the company, believes many are still sceptical about whether
plant-based products can perform as well as the competition, especially during a pandemic.
“Part of the goal of this product is — yes, it's a hand sanitizer, it will keep you safe against germs
and viruses in the short term, but it will also help protect the skin in the long term as well. I
think that's something that's kind of unique.”