Aveeno stonewalls; and introducing eosinophils, the "riflemen" in your skin

So I wrote to Aveeno the other day, asking them two very simple questions:

1. What makes the Eczema Therapy line different from any of their umpteen other moisturizers?
2. What data can they show to prove that it works?

I found out that Aveeno is owned by Johnson and Johnson, and that, despite Aveeno's friendly Facebook video, J&J is as terrible at customer relations as any giant corporation.
Answer #1:

...the Aveeno® Advanced Care™ Moisturizing  Cream is different in these ways:

Essential ACTIVE NATURALS®:
-Pure oat essence and natural colloidal oatmeal to soothe skin
-Ceramides to help enhance skin's ability to retain moisture
-Plus moisture-rich oat oil

However,  this product has since been discontinued.

Not particularly helpful, since that wasn't the product I asked about. I wrote them again, repeating my original question. We'll see what they say. The active ingredient in the Eczema Therapy lotion is 1% colloidal oatmeal. Hardly revolutionary. Is it any different from anything else Aveeno puts out? Probably not.

Answer #2:

We are very sorry, but our company policy prohibits disclosing this type of information. Most of our research, marketing and sales information is proprietary, as is information regarding our ingredient percentages and formulations of individual products.

So: none of your business.

I did call the FDA to see if there were any instances on record of an official FDA warning letter being sent to Aveeno (recall, Peter Lio told me Aveeno had come out with this line a few years ago, and got their hand slapped because they were making an unsubstantiated therapeutic claim).  I was shuttled from the cosmetics division to the drug division-- colloidal oatmeal is classed as a drug, I found out, with the magical property of "skin protectant." There are no warning letters on record. I'm guessing that perhaps there was some low-level communication from the FDA to Aveeno that resulted in them listing colloidal oatmeal as the active ingredient.

The ridiculous thing is that someone at some point had to register oatmeal as a drug, which must have involved all kinds of safety trials.

* * *

Last week, you may recall, saw the end of the annual conference of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. On the Saturday before last, there was this session in the afternoon called the "Great Atopic Dermatitis Raft Debate." I have now found out what this was about, or more specifically, what "raft" is doing in the title. From the conference brochure:

Premise: Experts involved in atopic dermatitis management are adrift in a life raft. There's enough food and water in the raft for only one to survive, and the surrounding waters are teeming with sharks. Each expert has exactly 15 minutes to make his case. Come and see who gets tossed to the sharks!

This explains why sharks feature so prominently in the Powerpoint of Mitchell Grayson, MD, one of the presenters. I wrote to all four professors in the debate, asking if they could send me their presentations and save me paying $350 to the ACAAI (now there's a posse of sharks) for the conference DVD. Only Grayson obliged. So I declare him, by default, the winner-- we toss Mark Boguniewicz, Donald Leung, and Lawrence Schwartz off the raft.

Grayson represented "eosinophils" in this epic tussle. Eosinophils are a type of white blood cell. My PhD topic had an immunological focus (helper T cells) but I really never heard diddly about eosinophils, so I was excited to go through his presentation. Let me share the gist:

On the battleground of eczema, eosinophils are the "riflemen," according to Grayson.

Eosinophils are, he argues, the cells most responsible for eczema. (Keep in mind that he was trying to win a 15-minute debate.)

Eosinophils, triggered through a signaling chain that begins with mast cells and goes through T cells, are the ones who "shoot" pathogens, destroying them with reactive oxygen species (e.g. peroxides) and "cytotoxic granules," aka poison. We'll ignore the fact that history usually holds the generals responsible for what the army does in war, although recent events at Gitmo show that we may not have enough perspective on that conflict yet.

Activated eosinophils are found in the middle layer of skin in patients with eczema. In normal skin, eosinophils have no business being there. Some scientists think that eosinophils contribute to skin irritation by releasing their toxic payloads. Here's a microscopic view of an eosinophil, from Grayson's Powerpoint:

You can see a cytotoxic granule highlighted. Some evidence that skin eosinophils may play an important role in eczema: urinary levels of eosinophil products are proportional to the severity of eczema; treatment of eczema with tacrolimus and pimecrolimus reduces the number of skin (but not blood) eosinophils; reduction of blood eosinophils has no effect on eczema. One experimental mouse model develops eczema only if eosinophils are present.

So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence against eosinophils. Our real question: OK, say you prove eosinophils are the key-- how can we target them to prevent eczema?

On that, Grayson has no answer. We can forgive him, though. It seems that dendritic cells and adhesion molecules are really what he specializes in.