Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Denmark

Grant category: LEO Foundation Visiting Researchers

Year: 2026

Geography: Türkiye

Behçet’s disease is a chronic inflammatory condition that commonly causes recurring skin and mouth lesions, significantly affecting patients’ quality of life. The reasons why the immune system becomes overactive are not fully understood. This project aims to investigate whether substances circulating in the blood of patients contribute to immune cell activation and inflammation. By comparing blood samples from patients with Behçet’s disease and healthy individuals, we will explore blood over-immune activity and effects on skin involvements. Understanding these mechanisms may help explain why some patients experience more severe or persistent disease. The findings may help identify blood-based indicators of disease activity and support the development of more targeted treatments for inflammatory diseases.

Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2026

Geography: USA

The 18th International Symposium on Dendritic Cells (DC2026) will take place on October 11-14, 2026, in San Diego, USA. This international meeting brings together scientists and clinicians studying dendritic cells: immune cells that help the body decide when to fight infection or limit unnecessary inflammation. In the skin, dendritic cells play a particularly important role. The skin is the body’s largest immune organ and is constantly exposed to microbes, allergens, and environmental stress. When dendritic cell function is disturbed, it can lead to skin diseases such as psoriasis, dermatitis, infection, and skin cancer. With support from the LEO Foundation, DC2026 will include a dedicated skin-focused program with a plenary session, poster presentations, and networking activities. Funding will also support early-career researchers, helping them share new discoveries and build collaborations that advance skin health. More information: https://www.dc2026sandiego.com/

Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2026

Geography: USA

The Resident and Post Doc Retreat is a conference hosted by the Society for Investigative Dermatology (SID) each year since 2001. The program format provides a protected space in which residents can interact with senior faculty and established investigators for the purpose of fostering attendees’ interest in academic research careers. The program is a combination of formal lectures and presentations, informal discussions, brainstorming sessions and social activities. The retreat is held at the time of the SID annual meeting, which allows attendees to establish connections with each other, and to other meeting attendees. These social networks foster collegiality, collaborations, and appreciation for the creative, multidisciplinary nature of science and other productive interactions.

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Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Australia

Our skin changes as we age, and one of the main reasons is that its layers gradually become stiffer, a process that is even more exaggerated in skin disease such as skin fibrosis. Surprisingly, these mechanical properties have received little attention in skin research. With new advances in mechanobiology, we now know that skin cells sense and respond to these mechanical changes. This project will create a realistic 3D human skin model using smart biomaterials that mimic the natural stiffness of each skin layer. By studying how skin cells behave in this lifelike environment over time, we aim to uncover how tissue mechanics contribute to skin health and disease. The insights gained may identify new treatment targets and support the development of “mechanotherapy”, therapies that work by gently adjusting the mechanical properties of skin to improve healing and reduce disease.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: Switzerland

Skin diseases such as mastocytosis, chronic hives, and atopic dermatitis involve immune cells called mast cells (MCs) and affect much people. Such conditions severely reduce quality of life, and many patients do not respond well to existing treatments. A major reason for the slow development of better therapies is that research still relies on animal models, which do not fully reflect human skin biology, or on limited patient samples. This project aims to address this problem by developing the first fully human, scaffold-free skin model that contains functional MCs. This innovative model closely mimics natural human skin and allows researchers to study how MCs cause inflammation and damage the skin barrier under realistic conditions. It will enable testing of new treatments directly in a human-based system, reducing the need for animal experiments. This project will improve our understanding of MC-driven skin diseases and help accelerate the discovery of better therapies for patients.

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: USA

Bullous pemphigoid (BP) is a serious blistering skin disease usually treated with long courses of steroids, which can cause major side effects. Despite advances in treatment, therapy for acute disease still relies heavily on prolonged high-dose oral corticosteroids. We found that a molecule called VEGF-A—known for driving inflammation—is much higher in the blood, and skin of people with BP. VEGF-A also rises alongside many other inflammatory signals. Early experiments in mice show that blocking VEGF-A can make the disease noticeably less severe. This project will test whether targeting VEGF-A can quickly reduce skin involvement in relevant models of pemphigoid. We will also study whether VEGF-A made specifically by skin cells is a key trigger of inflammation, and whether blocking VEGF-A in the skin (including with topical treatments) can help. The goal is to determine if VEGF-A could be a new, fast-acting, steroid-sparing treatment for BP.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2026

Geography: United Kingdom

Genetics alone cannot account for the alarming increase in atopic dermatitis (AD) and allergic disease over the last few decades. Thus, we must look to understand the impact of environmental factors in the development of skin disease and allergy. Micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs), as well as chemical plasticizers, have become ubiquitous environmental contaminants. Albeit epidemiological data suggests a link between exposure to such plastic pollutants and development of AD and allergy, it remains unknown how they may impact on skin health and the immune system as a whole. This discovery study will define how MNPs and plasticizers affect skin immunity and characterise mechanism(s) whereby they regulate initiation of allergic disease. Results from this project will delineate how plastic pollutants may alter skin immunology and affect specific sensitisation pathways, thus elucidating new immune-therapeutic targets against skin barrier disruption, skin inflammation and allergy.