Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: LEO Foundation Awards

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Dr. Christoph Ellebrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania.

He received the prestigious LEO Foundation Award 2024 in Region Americas during the SID annual meeting in San Diego. The award recognizes Dr. Christoph Ellebrecht for his scientific contributions to our understanding of T cell biology in the skin and its diseases.

The LEO Foundation Award – worth USD 100,000 – recognizes outstanding young researchers and scientists from around the world whose work represents an extraordinary contribution to skin research and has the potential to pave the way for new and improved treatments for skin diseases.

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Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

The goal of DREAM (Dermatology Research Across Multiple Disciplines) is to unravel the complex mechanisms linking chronic inflammatory and autoimmune skin diseases to systemic complications. By identifying key factors that predict disease progression and multi-organ involvement, the aim is to enhance our ability to forecast individual disease trajectories.

The overall vision of DREAM is to uncover and solve leading research questions in dermatological and associated diseases using a systems medicine approach.

Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2025

Geography: Switzerland

ESDR Future Leaders Academy, a 3-day event from 6.-8. November 2025 held in Nice with the theme ’Excellence in skin science, future is ours’. The goal of this initiative is to foster excellence in academic dermatology and encourage gifted young dermatologists to further pursue their careers through guidance and mentoring. The program is primarily open to European residents currently engaged in skin-related research (MD, PhD, Post-Doc). There will be 25 applicants who will be selected to present their current research, along with 7 mentors who will make a more personal and inspiring presentation. Besides scientific sessions there is a strong emphasis on encouraging young people to network and to exchange ideas during the academy.

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Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2025

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 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.