What exactly is inside the vapes and nicotine pouches millions of adults use every day? In our latest episode of Clearing the Air, toxicologist Chris Allen takes us inside the lab to reveal the complex science of harm reduction and the shocking truth about the UK’s black market.
Peter Beckett: Give me a 30-second introduction of who you are and why you’re interested in the nicotine world.
Chris Allen: I’m Chris Allen, Chief Executive Officer of Broughton. Broughton is a contract research organization. Our focus is analytical chemistry and toxicology, looking at what’s in a product, how it behaves, and its potential effect on human health.
Peter Beckett: So you’re at the frontline of determining how safe these things actually are.
Chris Allen: Yes. Obviously the term safety is used very carefully, but we’re trying to understand the potential positive and negative effects of the product and how it could affect health.
Peter Beckett: Explain to me as if I’m a five-year-old child or a Labrador. You’ve got a product that comes in and you want to determine how relatively safe it is. What process does that product go through?
Chris Allen: A lot of our focus is HPHC testing—harmful and potentially harmful constituents. There are certain analytes mandated by the FDA, but it depends on the product. For a nicotine product, you’re looking for impurities such as tobacco-specific nitrosamines, which are highly carcinogenic. They can come from the manufacturing process or raw materials, but they can also form over time. We put products under very controlled conditions, analyze them maybe every three months, and look for changes in their chemical structure.
Peter Beckett: That would be stability testing. What about aerosol testing? The whole “light” scandal was predicated on analytical methods used to test cigarette smoke. How similar are those methods, and why are they reliable when so many people said they weren’t for years?
Chris Allen: Those methods developed over time to do a fantastic job. However, as products change, methodologies aren’t always as suitable as they used to be. For a naturally occurring tobacco product, there’s a lot of variation, so you can live with variation in your method. We’re now seeing products move closer to traditional medicinal nicotine products. The FDA expects higher levels of precision and lower levels of constituents to assess health effects, so methods are evolving rapidly.
Peter Beckett: In simple terms, what do you do? You get a vape, hook it up to a machine, and then what?
Chris Allen: You collect the aerosol in a liquid or on a filter pad. After that, it’s like putting a Smartie on filter paper at school to see the colors separate. That is chromatography. We put the sample onto the instrument and it separates the constituents. Instead of the eye detecting colors, we use mass spectrometry to break the molecules up so we can understand what they are. We look at the ions to determine what those constituents are and their levels.
Peter Beckett: When we compare the constituents from a filter pad for a vape to what you get in a cigarette, how do those compare?
Chris Allen: They do not compare in the slightest. With tobacco, you’re combusting, so you’re getting thousands of combustion analytes. For a vape product, the majority of constituents are transferred from the liquid. You’re aerosolizing that liquid and capturing it. You have flavor constituents, but you also have to be careful of thermal degradants and things that can leach out of plastic. If you’re testing a tobacco product, you have a clear list of defined analytes. For a vape product, there are certain markers like carbonyls, but every product has a very different profile.
Peter Beckett: So what goes in comes back out.
Chris Allen: Ideally. A lot of companies are trying to create products that transfer liquid to aerosol with minimal change, but in many products, you do see changes in those constituents.
Peter Beckett: How much variation do you see between different products, and what drives it?
Chris Allen: The main thing is the ingredients, and especially where people start using natural ingredients. It becomes very complex because you could start with one ’natural’ mixture, which is actually made up of five different ‘natural’ ingredients. Each one of those could be made up of 50 to 100 different chemicals. People think natural must be better, but in this space generally natural can present certain health risks. Whereas you can have very clean synthetic products.
Peter Beckett: How did you, a non-smoker from a village in North Yorkshire, turn into the man who analyses vapes?
Chris Allen: The journey started in the pharmaceutical industry with Broughton nearly 20 years ago. We were working on nicotine replacement therapy, testing gums and lozenges. We worked on a medicinal licensed product called Voke and became interested in the technology. That took us into the Tobacco Products Directive and eventually PMTAs for the US. I wanted to make a difference. In pharma, we test medicines that save lives. This industry allows us to move from cure into prevention. Seeing the harm combustibles cause, having a role in counteracting that is a passion that drives the business.
Peter Beckett: A lot of people are down on British business at the moment. You’ve built a very successful one and one that grown remarkably quickly, in a part of the country that’s not normally associated with dynamism and entrepreneurship – although it is very beautiful. How have you found attracting the staff that you need? Is it difficult to convince highly qualified chemists to move up into the Yorkshire Dales?
Chris Allen: It’s not that difficult now, unfortunately. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of the industry is really struggling. There are a lot of people looking for jobs, so actually recruiting people now is not a challenge. What we really like to do is build people through the business. Three of our strategic management team members all joined as fresh graduates about 15 years ago. It’s a long, slow process, but we like to bring in that talent at a young age, and complement it with expertise coming in externally.
Peter Beckett: Why aren’t more people running successful STEM businesses in the UK? What is the UK doing wrong outside of the nicotine world?
Chris Allen: Brexit has caused problems. The UK government allows medicines from Europe without additional testing, but the EU treats the UK as a third country, requiring quality control testing in the EU. This has damaged manufacturing. There’s a big push for innovation, but they seem to be forgetting about manufacturing jobs. For every manufacturing job, it affects about ten other jobs in the local economy. There is a push away from core skills toward innovation, which is where the money goes rather than supporting existing businesses.
Peter Beckett: The north of England has always had strong manufacturing. Why this business and this part of the country at this moment?
Chris Allen: You’ve essentially the triangle around Blackburn, that area. It could just be coincidence that there were a few entrepreneurs in that area. There is lots of manufacturing capability, there is a lot of office space, lots of warehouse space. There is a lower cost of living in that area, which allows to keep wages down and for companies to be more competitive.
Peter Beckett: What drives the different approaches to nicotine between countries like the UK, US, and Australia?
Chris Allen: Generally, it’s politics and a lack of information. We can’t expect MPs to know everything, and it doesn’t take much to change their opinion. Misinformation discussed in bill debates can drive legislation once an authority figure says it. It’s driven by politics and misinformation.
Peter Beckett: Is the aggregate of the data you produce useful for policy making, and is there an elegant way to communicate it?
Chris Allen: It’s difficult to put it into a simple perspective. We have to tackle basic elements first. We recently assessed 70 products for Trading Standards, and only three met requirements. Some had mold or labels not in English. If companies can’t meet basic requirements, a deeper narrative is a waste of time right now.
Peter Beckett: I didn’t realise you worked with pouches and snus. What did you have to learn to test those?
Chris Allen: That was an easier transition because a lot of the labs that we compete against have derived from the tobacco industry. We’ve come from the pharmaceutical industry and we still have that as a really strong part of the business. It’s our heritage and a lot of that work nicotine gums, nicotine lozenges, there’s not too much difference between a pouch. Whereas say a lot of the traditional labs, that of the vape space is closer to traditional combustible tobacco products. But they started to move more towards that. Pharmaceutical standard pouches was a very, very easy transition because essentially it is a pharmaceutical style. Solid dose products inserted in the mouth. Generally quite clean in terms of the matrix. So it just fitted into our core competency very, very easily.
Peter Beckett: What are you finding in nicotine pouches at the moment?
Chris Allen: The market is congested. My biggest concern is companies using high strengths or flashy packaging to stand out. People make dangerous assumptions about “food grade” ingredients, which still have inclusion levels that shouldn’t be exceeded. People aren’t aware of potential health risks. While the risk is negligible compared to combustibles, people need more education on product design and standards.
Peter Beckett: To what extent is that residual risk material compared to cigarettes?
Chris Allen: It’s very low compared to cigarettes, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. We should strive for safety without making products so benign that they don’t appeal to consumers.
Peter Beckett: Chris, thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Chris Allen: Cheers. Thank you.
