Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Millions of people suffer from infected wounds each year, which can lead to serious complications or even death if untreated. Current methods for diagnosing wound infections are slow and require specialized laboratories. Gohar Soufi’s project aims to create a simple, portable device that uses advanced materials to detect infections quickly and accurately right at the patient’s bedside. This technology could revolutionize how infections are diagnosed, helping doctors start treatments sooner and improving patient outcomes.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Australia

Using advances in stem cell and tissue engineering technologies, Kate Firipis will develop lab-grown skin tissue with 3D printed blood vessels derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (stem cells that can be created from a single blood draw) as a personalised treatment for repairing large complex wounds. Improving skin reconstruction outcomes, including, aesthetics, function, blood vessel connection and removing the need to harvest healthy patient tissue that creates a secondary wound.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: United Kingdom

Skin innervation is our sensory interface with the ever-changing environment undergoing fluctuations in temperature and humidity. Sensation needs to account for these fluctuations to regulate sense of touch, pain, movement, learning and memory, sexual and social conduct. More than 100 million bacteria that reside on the human skin are the first line of response to environmental perturbations. Variable humidity, salinity, temperature, and oxygen affect bacteria metabolism and diversity. Simone Di Giovanni therefore hypothesise that bacteria are required for sensory function affecting complex behaviours in response to perturbations in temperature and humidity. This bears implications for human physiology, health and resilience on earth.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

To elucidate novel mechanisms that orchestrate skin formation Alexander Marneros have focused on a genetic skin disease that manifests with scalp skin wounds at birth, aplasia cutis congenita (ACC). Alexander and his team found that the genes KCTD1 and KCTD15 are mutated in patients with ACC. These genes form a complex that inhibits the activity of AP-2 transcription factors. Inactivation of these genes in neural crest cells (NCCs), from which the mesenchymal cells of the midline cranial sutures are derived, results in ACC. The data provide evidence that keratinocyte growth factors are secreted by these mesenchymal cells to promote the formation of the overlying epidermis. A key open question is now to understand the precise pathomechanisms that are downstream of this KCTD1/KCTD15 – AP-2 signaling axis, which Alexander and the team will explore in this proposal. These experiments are expected to provide exciting new insights into how skin formation is controlled, which likely has important clinical relevance for multiple skin diseases.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Sweden

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common skin condition, characterized by itchy, inflamed skin. Identifying the allergens that trigger AD can be challenging, suggesting that allergen independent immune mechanisms are at play in AD. One key player in non-specific immune responses is a type of lymphocyte called ILC2. Itziar Martinez Gonzalez discovered that ILC2s in human skin can remember previous activations and induce a more severe inflammation upon subsequent triggers. Memory ILC2s could be important in triggering the recurrent flare-ups seen in AD. Now, Itziar Martinez Gonzalez aims to understand how memory ILC2s contribute to AD by studying how they are regulated at the cellular level and how they interact with their environment in the skin. Itziar and her team will also investigate if memory ILC2s play a role in the development of other allergic diseases associated with AD, like asthma. By studying how memory ILC2s function in AD, Itziar and the team hope to identify new ways to treat this chronic and often debilitating condition.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Staphylococcus aureus is the primary cause of skin infections and is a serious public health threat due to the emergence of antimicrobial-resistant strains as well as the failure of all vaccine clinical trials to date. Thus, there is an unmet need for new therapeutic strategies as alternatives to antibiotics and vaccines. Nathan Archer’s proposal aims to solve this problem by interrogating how our immune cells orchestrate protective responses against S. aureus infections. Specifically, Nathan and his team discovered that the amino acid, glutamine, is critical for host defense against S. aureus in the skin. They will use advanced “omics” approaches to understand how glutamine promotes host defense in specific immune cells in the skin using preclinical infection models as well as clinically infected skin. The goal of this study is to identify previously unrecognized immune pathways that can be targeted to augment host immunity against antimicrobial-resistant S. aureus and potentially other skin pathogens.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Germany

Chronic inflammatory skin diseases affect a quarter of the world’s population, but accurately diagnosing and effectively treating these conditions remains a challenge. This is largely because we do not fully understand how skin cells respond at the protein level to the numerous inflammatory signals. In Thierry Nordmann’s project, he and his team will create such a molecular dictionary using “omic technologies”, characterizing how skin cells react to a wide range of inflammatory signals (cytokines). Just as a language dictionary allows us to interpret the meaning of words, their molecular dictionary will enable us to understand the complex language of inflammation in diagnostic biopsies of the skin. In combination with artificial intelligence, they will use this dictionary to select the optimal therapy for the individual patient suffering from an inflammatory skin disease. This has the potential to improve patient outcomes while reducing side-effects and costs of ineffective therapies.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Tiffany Scharschmidts seek to understand how CD4+ T cells adapt to and survive in the skin. These cells are crucial for maintaining skin health but also drive diseases like atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. Despite this, we have much still to learn about the biology of CD4+ T cells residing in skin. To fill this gap, Tiffany and her team will use advanced single-cell techniques to study the metabolism of CD4+ T cells in both mouse and human skin. Preliminary data suggest these cells rely on glycolysis, and they aim to explore this further and identify other important metabolic pathways. In the first part of the study, they will use innovative mouse models and CRISPR-Cas9 technology to pinpoint key metabolic needs and regulators. In the second part, they will extend their findings to human skin, examining CD4+ T cells in both healthy and diseased states. The goal is to uncover how metabolism influences skin immune function, which could lead to new treatments for chronic inflammatory skin diseases.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Switzerland

Inflammatory skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis and psoriasis are debilitating and chronic conditions characterised by the appearance of rashes and scaly plaques. The symptoms are caused by overactivation of the immune system in which T cells play a key role. Current treatments are known to suppress the entire immune system or target pathways required for appropriate immunity and therefore are associated with significant risks for infections and cancer. Jean Pieters and his laboratory has recently defined a pathway that is selectively involved in T cell-mediated inflammatory skin disorders while being dispensable for normal immunity. Within this project Jean Pieters and his team aims to investigate the molecular mechanisms involved, and explore the potential of targeting this pathway as a therapeutic strategy for the suppression of skin inflammation while maintaining overall immunity. The results from this work may allow the delineation of hitherto unexplored and steroid-sparing therapies for inflammatory skin disorders.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Sweden

The versatile and complex functions of skin depend on its intricate structure, which comes from different cell origins during embryonic development. Despite its importance, we know little about how these origins shape skin health and disease across the body, partly because existing tools for studying skin are slow, expensive, and use many animals. Emma Andersson’s project aims to solve this by developing a fast and efficient way to study skin in different parts of the body, using a technique called in utero nano-injection, in mice. This method lets us precisely target and modify skin cells in developing mouse embryos, focusing on key regions like facial skin and body dermis. By creating new tools to study deeper cell layers in detail, Emma Andersson and her team can uncover how they work in normal conditions and diseases. This breakthrough would save time, reduce animal use, and open new doors for understanding and treating skin disorders.