Today@Dal

Backtracking on an ill-advised dragon or butterfly may get a little easier if a new cream developed by a researcher at Dalhousie University goes to market — a product that evolved from the PhD student's work on healing the heart after an injury.

Cipher Pharmaceuticals, based in Ontario, has licensed the rights to develop and market a topical cream created by PhD student Alec Falkenham.

"This technology has the potential to transform the process of tattoo removal and may give people the option of a topical cream instead of laser treatments, which are painful, costly and time consuming," company president and CEO Shawn O'Brien said in a release.

Side project during PhD

Falkenham, 29, who's in the pathology department at the Nova Scotia university, invented the product while conducting research on the processes that allow the heart to heal after injury. He worked on the tattoo cream as a side project to his thesis research, modifying a heart drug to increase the turnover of cells in tattoos.

"It's incredible, something I wouldn't have expected four years ago when I came up with the idea," he said Tuesday.

After someone gets a tattoo, the ink initiates an immune response and white blood cells called "macrophages" carry some of the ink to the body's lymph nodes.

But some of those macrophages that are filled with pigment stay put, embedded in the skin. That's what makes the tattoo visible under the skin.

Read the rest of this story: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/alec-falkenham-tattoo-removal-cream-deal-1.3563721