Explore our grantees and awardees

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: 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: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

The children’s book ’50 NYE vilde videnskabelige forsøg’ (Eng.: 50 NEW Wild Scientific Experiments) is a follow-up to the book ‘Manden der fik skåret sin hjerne i skiver og 49 andre vilde videnskabelige forsøg’. This publication will present exciting scientific discoveries and experiments, aiming to increase curiosity about science among the target group of 9-14-years-olds. The book will be published by Gads Forlag and will be accompanied by a related podcast series featuring some of the stories and content from its pages.

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Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Danmarks Naturfagslærerforening (Eng.: The Danish Association of Science Teachers) is publishing an anthology on didactic models and methods facilitating an experimental and investigative approach to natural science teaching in Danish schools – with a main focus on motivating students and offering solutions suited for direct implementation in the everyday teaching effort. The book called ‘Naturvidenskabelige undersøgelser – didaktik, elevmotivation og hverdagsrealisme’ (Eng.: Scientific Studies – Didactic, Student Motivation and Everyday Realism) will be distributed by the teachers’ association to its members and will be available for ordering or downloading for others, for free.

Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Through this grant the LEO Foundation Skin Immunology Research Center is expanding its scientific and technological capabilities by incorporating three new areas of expertise:

• Spatial transcriptomics (in collaboration with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR))
• Establishment of an animal facility for “wildlings”  – a special type of laboratory mice that contain a – controlled – level of microorganisms which make them more akin to real-world animals and provides a more natural model, in particular for interactions with and responses from the immune system.
• Establishment of advanced 3D skin models for experiments building on genetic manipulation of specific cell types from the skin.

Each area is carefully selected to strengthen the center’s focus on performing frontier research within barrier immunology.

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Science City Lyngby will produce 18 videos of female STEM role models to create awareness and interest among girls in STEM activities and education. The videos consist of three series, one focusing on personal stories of women working in STEM jobs, and another on interviews with well-known female science profiles of influence. The final series features girls attending Science Club, an after-school program offered by Science City Lyngby. The Science Club girls will also be actively involved together with a professional journalist in the planning and execution of the video series, creating identification and ensuring relevance for the main target group. The videos will be disseminated through 10 roadshows in other Danish municipalities, presentations at lower secondary schools, and a social media campaign also targeting parents and teachers.

Read more about Science Girls

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Folkeuniversitetet in Aarhus will establish a free annual science festival, PARK, for the public to take place at Aarhus University Park. Leading scientists will give talks about the latest research results, with the aim of promoting curiosity and contributing actively to democracy. The program will also feature events within music, literature, and art.

Grant category: Education and Awareness Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

The project Through the researchers’ eyes aims to improve natural science education in the lower secondary school by applying a teaching method known from the arts, Visual Thinking Strategies, which focuses on strengthening students’ skills within observation, description, and discussion – key elements also of the natural science disciplines – to stimulate students’ curiosity and active participation. The project is a collaboration between both education experts and university researchers from Copenhagen University, experts from VTSdanmark and chosen teachers.

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Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Jonathan Brewer’s project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Mike Barnkob, aims to advance skin biology by developing a much-needed human skin model with immune components, enabling detailed study of skin responses to stress and disease. By creating both normal and diseased skin models, with a focus on Cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus (CLE), Jonathan Brewer and his team will investigate the immune processes underlying CLE skin manifestations and provide a platform for developing targeted treatments. These models will also allow Jonathan and the team to study how skin and immune cells respond to UV radiation and mechanical forces, both of which play a significant role in CLE, where such stimuli can exacerbate skin lesions. A key innovation is the use of MERFISH technology, which maps gene activity within individual cells. This will reveal how specific genes are activated or suppressed in response to stimuli, providing insights into how skin adapts over time at the single-cell level. By comparing normal and CLE skin models, they will identify unique pathways involved in disease progression in CLE, offering potential targets for new therapeutic strategies.

The results of the project will be 3D skin models that mimic the structure and environment of human skin, enabling a wide range of experimental applications, including more rapid and ethical drug discovery. The project will also deliver the identification of pathways and molecular regulators involved in CLE and skin responses to UV and mechanical stimuli, supporting targeted treatment development and improved patient outcomes.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

The ATHENA project will explore the untapped potential of stratum corneum nanotexture (SCN, the nanoscale morphology of the outermost skin layer) to advance research and clinical evaluations of challenging-to-diagnose conditions: psoriasis, hand eczema (HE), and actinic keratosis (AK). Edwin En-Te Hwu’s MIDAS group has previously demonstrated that deep learning models could classify atopic dermatitis severity through SCN with high accuracy. Building on these findings, ATHENA aims to identify disease phenotypes across ethnicities and skin phototypes to optimize treatment strategies. ATHENA will: a) collect 1,050 stratum corneum tape strip samples from five countries across four continents, b) build a large dataset of 13,500 SCN images, c) develop self-supervised deep learning models to correlate SCN with skin conditions, and d) explore and identify robust SCN biomarkers for skin diseases. The non-invasive stratum corneum tape strip sampling method is painless and repeatable, causing no tissue damage and allowing frequent monitoring of therapy and disease progression. This method enables patients to collect samples at home for remote analysis, facilitating early detection and intervention to reduce social and economic burden.