Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Elastin is a structural protein essential for human life. It provides the elasticity needed for organs like skin, lungs, and blood vessels, allowing your skin to stretch, your lungs to expand for breathing and your blood to flow smoothly. As we age, factors like oxidative stress can make elastin stiffer, reducing the skin’s elasticity and accelerating the aging process. This can lead to skin conditions, such as thickening and furrowing or increased fragility. This project uses advanced analytical techniques to investigate how oxidative damage affect elastin’s structure and stability, starting with its building block, tropoelastin, and extending to skin elastin. Our goal is to understand how these alterations contribute to elastic fiber breakdown and tissue dysfunction. Ultimately, this knowledge will help us understand how elastin damage drives disease and tissue degeneration, which could lead to better treatments that protect tissue elasticity and improve overall health.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: Australia

Imagine living with a condition where your skin is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings, constantly blistering and tearing. This is what people with Epidermolysis Bullosa experience. Existing treatments only provide temporary relief and do not address the root causes of the condition. Our Team have created tiny multifunctional robots that are solution for this debilitating disease. These robots carry simultaneously healing substances and bacteria-fighting agents. The healing substances activate different cells in the body to address the genetic issues of EB. The bacteria-fighting agents help the immune system, speed up healing, and fight infections. They also restore the skin’s natural balance, which helps prevent new blisters. These robots are delivered precisely to the damaged skin using advanced materials. This new method targets multiple aspects of the disease and offers a complete solution that is superior to current treatments, providing hope for those with EB.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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. Our 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 in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: Australia

Using advances in stem cell and tissue engineering technologies, we 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 in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: France

The main goal of this project is to determine how the beneficial bacterium, Cutibacterium acnes (C. acnes), that naturally lives on human skin causes acne. We hypothesize that changes in amount and types of oils (called sebum) secreted by skin oil glands may play a part in turning the beneficial C. acnes to disease-causing bacteria. Sebum profile changes may make C. acnes grow and behave differently, and cause skin inflammation. One way that sebum changes make C. acnes cause inflammation may be by extracellular vesicles, which are very small sacs released by the bacteria. Since androgen, a type of sex hormone, is known to increase sebum, medications that block androgens are currently used to treat acne. Thus, another aim of this project is to see if blocking androgens can manage acne by targeting sebum profile changes that affect inflammation caused by C. acnes. Our project will allow us to gain more knowledge on how acne develops and justify the use of androgen blockers as treatment.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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. I 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 in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

To elucidate novel mechanisms that orchestrate skin formation we have focused on a genetic skin disease that manifests with scalp skin wounds at birth, aplasia cutis congenita (ACC). We 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. Our 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 we 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 in open competition

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. I 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, I aim 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. We 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, we hope to identify new ways to treat this chronic and often debilitating condition.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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. Our proposal aims to solve this problem by interrogating how our immune cells orchestrate protective responses against S. aureus infections. Specifically, we discovered that the amino acid, glutamine, is critical for host defense against S. aureus in the skin. We 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 in open competition

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 this project, we 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, our molecular dictionary will enable us to understand the complex language of inflammation in diagnostic biopsies of the skin. In combination with artificial intelligence, we 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.