Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

The project aims to create a free educational board game for 2nd-3rd grade STEM classes. The goal is to strengthen the pupils’ curiosity, motivation to learn, and understanding of scientific methods through play, collaboration, and inquiry-based missions. The project targets STEM primary school teachers at large, with an added focus on also enabling qualified STEM teaching for non-specialist teachers. The game may be played in four different thematic variations which are aligned with the curriculum – 1) the human body, 2) technology and resources, 3) organisms, and 4) water, air, and climate. The goal is to distribute class sets of five games each to 400 schools, thereby reaching up to 21,000 pupils annually.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Necrotising Soft Tissue Infections, (flesh eating disease), are rapidly progressing, life threatening infections mostly caused by Group A Streptococcus. Current treatments are surgery and antibiotics, but are often insufficient leading to high rates of amputation and death.

This project develops phage therapy as a targeted alternative. Building on our previous work where we identified the first effective phages against GAS, we will expand and test phages and use computational models to design optimal phage cocktails that maximise bacterial coverage while reducing resistance risk.

To enable effective treatment in infected tissue, we will develop a hydrogel based delivery system to stabilise and deliver phages locally. The most promising therapies will be tested in advanced human skin models that mimic NSTI.

The aim is to create a new, targeted therapeutic approach, that complements existing treatment, improves infection control, and reduces the need for surgery and amputation.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Darier’s disease is a rare skin disorder causing painful skin lesions, recurrent infections, and profound psychosocial burden, including depression. No treatment addresses the underlying cause – patients manage symptoms with limited, poorly tolerated therapies.

The disease results from a fault in one copy of the ATP2A2 gene, leaving skin cells with insufficient levels of SERCA2, a protein critical for calcium signaling. The other copy remains intact.

Our approach exploits this: rather than replacing the faulty gene, we use a small engineered RNA molecule to stabilize the healthy copy’s molecular instructions, boosting SERCA2 production to levels sufficient to correct the disease. The therapy is reversible, does not alter the genome, and is designed for topical delivery to affected skin.

The same platform can in principle be redirected to other diseases caused by the same type of genetic fault – opening the door to treatments for a broad range of currently incurable conditions.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is the most common chronic inflammatory skin condition worldwide. Its main symptom is chronic pruritus, an intense itch that severely disrupts patients’ sleep, mental health, and social well-being.

This urge to scratch is driven by a signalling molecule called Interleukin-31 (IL-31). To trigger the sensation of itch, IL-31 binds to a receptor on the cell surface transferring a signal to the inside that sets off a cascade of reactions. While this interaction is the key to unlocking the itch, the molecular details of the initiation mechanism remain a mystery.

Using Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM), a Nobel Prize-winning imaging technique, we can “”take a snapshot”” of IL-31 binding to its full-length receptor. This knowledge can help to design better and more specific treatments, especially for patients who do not respond to the current ones, to shut down the itch where it starts.

Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

“Hudlægens Bord” is a cross-media project that delivers evidence-based knowledge about the skin and skin diseases through podcasts, videos, articles, and social media. Its aim is to combat misinformation and provide accessible, trustworthy information to a broad audience, including young adults, people living with skin diseases, and healthcare professionals. The podcast series is hosted by a dermatologist and places particular emphasis on communicating the latest knowledge and research on maintaining skin health and treating skin conditions. The project is developed and produced in close collaboration with a team of experienced science communication experts, ensuring high scientific quality and engaging dissemination across all formats.

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

The project aims to strengthen Danish pupils’ understanding of numbers and algebra through novel, research-based didactics. It combines two research approaches, læringsspor (“learning trajectories”) and kernepraksisser (“core practices”) to improve the mathematics teaching at 11 schools in Kalundborg. The project will reach about 200 students in the 5th grade within the municipality as a test case. Their 15 teachers and 8 local math supervisors will co-create educational material focused on fractions and equations together with researchers from University College Absalon. The purpose is to improve the students’ math competencies, support teachers’ professional development, enable peer-to-peer dissemination to other teachers, and contribute to providing a basis for a nationwide initiative. The developed material will become available for digital download for free after the project at www.paa-sporet.dk, and the results will be presented to interested parties at a closing conference in October 2027 and follow-up courses.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Atopic dermatitis is one of the most common childhood diseases with no effective prevention, which is urgently needed to reduce the number of children growing up with this disease. My ambition is to investigate whether the air pollution that children are exposed to, the environment they grow up in and the number of infections they contract in the first years of life are related to later development of childhood eczema. I will try to understand the mechanisms behind such relations and this is done by analyzing the pregnant mother and newborn child’s blood profiles, which may reveal which children are more prone to develop eczema based on how the environment shapes their blood profile. By looking for specific blood markers, we may be able to say exactly who is prone to develop eczema and our hope is to contribute the development of a strategy where simple blood tests can reveal how and which children that will develop eczema in the future.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a frequent childhood skin disease with a substantial impact on patients’ daily lives. Its development is influenced by many factors, including genetics and the environment. Children in areas with hard water develop AD more often, but it is unclear why, whether other water compounds than the ones comprising hardness play a role, and also whether softening water can reduce risk. These will be the key elements to study in the current proposed project, which will evaluate how early-life drinking water composition affects the risk and severity of AD. This can be achieved by combining detailed water data with health information in two well-characterized mother-child cohorts and also in the entire Danish population. The findings may guide prevention strategies, inform caregivers, and provide evidence to support public health policies in Denmark regarding the health benefits of central water softening.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Pyoderma gangrenosum is a rare but severe inflammatory skin disease that causes painful, non-healing wounds. In many patients, the skin disease is linked to inflammation in other organs, especially the gut, but it is not known how inflammation starting in the skin can spread through the body. This project uses a specially developed animal model that closely mimics the human disease, showing both skin ulcers and gut inflammation. Using state of the art biomolecular techniques we will study how immune cells and inflammatory signals move between skin and intestine, and we aim to understand how a local skin disease can become systemic. The results may help improve diagnosis and guide more targeted treatments for patients. The project is carried out within the framework of the DREAM Center, which brings together experts across medical disciplines to study complex inflammatory diseases affecting multiple organs.