Research Grants

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.