Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

The LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellows received a two-year leadership coaching program as an add-on grant to their existing fellowship.

The LEO Foundation Fellows Leadership Coaching Program (LCP) will help identifying the fellow’s key strengths as well as their potential key leadership obstacles and situations they find most challenging within leadership – and how to handle these situations. During the coaching sessions they will identify and train new leadership skills going forward which can help them perform even better.

Potential themes for the leadership coaching sessions could be elements from the following sections:

• Learn more about your leadership style and get the best out of it
• Setting up – and leading the team
• Stakeholder Management
• Mentoring

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Project: Leveraging Real-World Data for Dermato-Epidemiological Research of Bullous Pemphigoid and Lichen Planus in Denmark

Bullous pemphigoid and lichen planus are inflammatory diseases of the skin and mucosa causing significant discomfort and reduced quality of life. Still, their causes, treatments, and long-term effects are poorly understood. The project will use Denmark’s unique health registries to explore how common these diseases are, what triggers them, how they are managed, and their broader health impact. Findings will support data-driven healthcare, ensuring better resource allocation and equitable access to specialized care. Improved understanding of the diseases and their complications will also highlight gaps in care, improve disease awareness, and empower shared decision-making for patients and doctors. The project will be conducted within ARISE (the Aarhus University Research group for Investigating Skin disease Epidemiology), a new research initiative aimed at establishing a lasting foundation for this novel type of skin disease research and better patient care.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Project: The unraveling of the cutaneous microbiome in the pathogenesis of Hidradenitis Suppurativa: A potential treatment option

Millions of humans worldwide suffer from Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS), a chronic, auto-inflammatory skin disease, causing recurrent and painful boils in sweaty places. The foul-smelling nodules are often infected by anaerobic bacteria, but it is not yet known what role bacteria play in the development and worsening of the disease. With the often-used antibiotic treatment comes antibiotic resistance, a serious threat to the individual and global health. This project aims to decipher the functionality of the skin bacteria in HS and reveal their dynamics during antibiotic treatment by using advanced molecular methods. The final goal is to develop and test a non-antibiotic treatment based on bacteria from healthy skin. The outcome is an insight into the interplay between the bacteria and human cells and a step towards a better treatment strategy in HS.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Multiplexed Imaging-Powered Deep Visual Proteomics for Precision Dermatology

Skin diseases like mycosis fungoides (a type of skin cancer), psoriasis and eczema, are often hard to diagnose and treat, leading to years of suffering for patients. This project uses cutting-edge technology to map the proteins and immune cells in skin samples at a microscopic level. By combining this with artificial intelligence, the goal is to develop tools for earlier and more accurate diagnosis. The project also explores how the skin’s microbiome (the community of microbes living on the skin) influences these diseases, paving the way for new treatments. This research will enable faster personalized diagnoses, facilitate targeted treatments, and enhance patients’ quality of life.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Unraveling the Gut-Skin-Epigenome Axis: A Multi-Omics Approach to Early-Life Atopic Dermatitis

This project aims to uncover how gut health, immune responses, and environmental factors contribute to the development of atopic dermatitis (AD) in early life. By integrating data from the microbiome, proteins, and epigenetic changes, we will investigate how gut bacteria and their metabolites influence skin inflammation and immune regulation. We will also study how environmental exposures, like diet, stress, and pollution, leave lasting molecular “imprints” that may increase AD risk. Using data from the extensive COPSAC2010 birth cohort, we will track children from infancy to uncover early signs of AD and explore new targets for prevention and treatment. This research could pave the way for personalized, microbiome-based therapies to stop AD before it starts — shifting from managing symptoms to preventing the disease altogether.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

The LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellows received a two-year leadership coaching program as an add-on grant to their existing fellowship.

The LEO Foundation Fellows Leadership Coaching Program (LCP) will help identifying the fellow’s key strengths as well as their potential key leadership obstacles and situations they find most challenging within leadership – and how to handle these situations. During the coaching sessions they will identify and train new leadership skills going forward which can help them perform even better.

Potential themes for the leadership coaching sessions could be elements from the following sections:

• Learn more about your leadership style and get the best out of it
• Setting up – and leading the team
• Stakeholder Management
• Mentoring

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Checkpoint receptor pathways as new targets for the treatment of skin fibrosis

Fellowship theme: Advanced Therapeutics Research in Skin Diseases

Skin fibrosis results in thick and stiff skin with a limited barrier function. This causes an increased risk of infections, pain and reduced function. No cure is available, and treatment options are limited. Stinne Ravn Greisen’s vision is to improve the treatment of skin fibrosis. To do this, she will advance our understanding of how the immune system and its regulatory pathways contribute to the development of skin fibrosis.

Skin fibrosis is a result of a complex interplay between an overactive immune system and excessive production of proteins supporting the connective tissue. This is exemplified in the systemic autoimmune disease scleroderma, and in localized keloid scarring. She hypothesize that immune regulatory pathways play a central role in the development of skin fibrosis, and in this project, she will: 1. Investigate fibrosis in skin samples from scleroderma skin, keloid scars and healthy volunteers, where she will focus on how immune regulatory pathways affect the interaction between immune cells and production of connective tissue material. 2. Establish a skin model to test potential new treatment options, and to understand how the immune cells work in a complex environment. 3. Use a mouse model to better understand the development of skin fibrosis and to test potential new treatment options.

The complex interaction between the immune system and fibrosis development is still poorly understood, which explains the limited treatment options for skin fibrosis. Stinne Ravn Greisen’s project will contribute to a detailed understanding of the immune mechanisms contributing to skin fibrosis. This knowledge is essential to develop new and better treatments. The outcome of her project will benefit patients with skin fibrosis as a result of scleroderma or keloid scarring but will also increase our fundamental understanding of the fibrotic process which is involved in multiple conditions including systemic inflammatory diseases, cancers, and cardiovascular diseases.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Personalized medicine in dermatology: Algorithm assisted early identification of high-risk patients with hidradenitis suppurativa – initiation of prompt treatment in order to avoid disease progression

Fellowship theme: Systems Medicine in Dermatology

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that causes the formation of painful, impairing and suppurating boils. It plagues 1% of the global population at great cost to both the individual and society. While effective treatments exist, the most effective forms are expensive, and their use is restricted to patients with severe disease. Building on his expertise within clinical research, complex data analysis of genetic and environmental risk factors and construction of temporal disease trajectories, Rune Andersen’s research initiative aims at providing HS patients with individual risk assessment of disease progression and development of severe comorbidities.

Rune Andersen’s vision is to initiate personalized medicine within dermatology by creating a tool that can identify HS patients with a high risk of disease progression so that prompt preventive treatment at an early stage can be initiated.

To do so Rune Andersen and his group will take advantage of large established clinical cohorts, and through state-of-the-art techniques within datamining, clinical epidemiology, population genetics, and molecular biomedicine, he will uncover risk factors of individual disease progression and the development of severe comorbidities. This information is to be used to develop and validate predictive algorithms that can help in the transition from treatment to prevention.

Completion of this project will allow Rune Andersen to transition from standard of care to personalized medicine within HS by focusing on prevention of disease progression and comorbidity development rather than treatment. This will improve both patient welfare, and public resource-management and expenditures.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Optimizing treatment of psoriasis

Fellowship theme: Systems Medicine in Dermatology

Nikolai Loft’s project is dedicated to revolutionizing the treatment of psoriasis by personalizing approaches based on individual patient characteristics and needs. The focus is on determining the underlying reasons why some patients experience a loss in the effectiveness of their treatment and whether treatment of psoriasis can prevent the onset of psoriatic arthritis (PsA). By identifying predictive markers for these conditions, Nikolai Loft’s project aims to tailor treatment plans that maintain effectiveness over time and mitigate the risk of PsA and thereby improve patient outcomes substantially.

Nikolai Loft plans to identify markers that can predict loss of treatment response in patients with psoriasis and markers that can predict development of PsA. The project will capitalize on Denmark’s unique data infrastructure integrating national registries with bioresources. This will involve thorough characterization using existing registry data and additional in-depth immunological and genetic profiling using new biological samples from more than 1000 patients with psoriasis. Additionally, Nikolai Loft and his research group will, based on these findings, assess the PsA protective properties of treatments of psoriasis. The end goal is to develop models that can identify patients at risk of treatment failure or developing PsA enabling adjustments of treatment strategies to mitigate these risks.

Nikolai Loft hopes to be able to reduce the incidence of treatment failure and enhance the quality of life for individuals with psoriasis by enabling more stable and effective treatment regimens. By doing so, he hopes to decrease healthcare costs associated with switching therapies. In the long term, by preventing PsA, this research project seeks to reduce the overall burden of psoriasis and its complications. Ultimately, tailoring treatment to the individual patient’s needs.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Uncoupling the contribution of systemic and site-specific immunity in inflammatory skin disorders

Fellowship theme: Advanced Therapeutics Research in Skin Diseases

Patients with skin diseases can often suffer from other conditions like asthma, arthritis and inflammatory diseases of the intestines, suggesting that these diseases may be linked by a common cause. Importantly, there is currently no tool that can be used in the clinic to measure skin disease activity regularly. In the skin, resident memory T cells (TRM) can reside for years, providing protection to old and new infections, but at times, causing inflammatory skin diseases. A portion of these cells are thought to migrate through our bodies via the blood and there is the possibility that these inflammatory T cells can land in other organs and cause disease. Finding these rather rare inflammatory T cells has been difficult.

Wenning Zheng’s research project will focus on using the blood of healthy people and patients with eczema, psoriasis, and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) to find these rare aggressive T cells. Using sensitive new assays and building on her expertise as a computational immunologist, her group at LEO Foundation Skin Immunology Research Center will employ high resolution single cell T cell clones sequencing on donor-matched blood and tissues to understand the propensity for T cells to circulate from the skin, through the blood and into other organs. Since T cells quite specifically recognize antigens through a highly-diverse receptor on their cell surface, Wenning will characterize the diversity of these receptors and combine machine learning and wet-lab methods to identify the nature of antigens that are detected by T cells. It is hoped that by understanding the precise antigens that T cells see, we can develop tools to diagnose and treat skin diseases with greater precision.