Grant category: Research Grants

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Multiple common skin diseases, like psoriasis, are characterized by excessive inflammation of the affected skin. This causes itching and pain and makes wound healing difficult. Thus, skin inflammation is of general discomfort for the affected patients. Anti-inflammatory drugs, for example inhibitors of the TNF signaling pathway, are highly successful in the clinic for some but not all types of skin inflammation. Rune Hartmann’s project aims at a better understanding of the underlying causes of skin inflammation and how to develop better drugs in the future. Furthermore, Rune Hartmann and his team are investigating how the same signaling pathway can drive skin inflammation and thus cause pathology, while being a critical part of healthy skin development. This is critical to understand how to target future drugs specifically towards the pathological inflammation and avoid unwanted side effects.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Valerie Horsley’s project will investigate how lipids and adipocyte-derived molecules suppress fibroblast production of proteins that cause fibrosis. Valerie and her team found that adipocytes release lipids during fibrosis and that this prevents fibrosis development. Their work will identify functional mechanisms that can be targeted for future therapies for skin fibrosis, a debilitating and deadly disorder that lacks any current therapies.

Grant category: Research Grants

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. Andrea Heinz’ 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. The goal is to understand how these alterations contribute to elastic fiber breakdown and tissue dysfunction. Ultimately, this knowledge will help them 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

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. Wojciech Chrzanowski and his 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

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.