Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Psoriasis is a prevalent chronic autoimmune skin disease considered a major global health issue, driven by overactive immune signals, especially those from interleukins IL-17 and IL-23 pathways. Current therapies, mainly injectable antibody drugs, can be highly effective but are costly, requiring medical administration, and remain in patients for weeks, causing long-term safety concerns. Our project aims to create a new class of smaller molecules that work like antibodies but act rapidly and will ultimately be taken orally. Using discoveries from our lab on CDR-H3-mimicking small molecules—structures inspired by the critical binding loops of antibodies—we can precisely block interactions that trigger IL-17 and IL-23 activity. This innovative technology could deliver powerful anti-psoriasis molecules that are easier to dose, more affordable, and potentially safer for long-term care. Success will open the door to a new generation of small-molecule therapies for autoimmune diseases.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) is a rare and very painful skin disease that causes rapidly enlarging ulcers which can destroy tissue and severely impair quality of life. It is often misdiagnosed because there are no specific tests and its ulcers resemble other chronic wounds, leading to delays, wrong treatments, and prolonged suffering. PG is frequently linked to other serious conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease or arthritis. Current therapies mainly suppress the immune system but are often ineffective, and no approved targeted treatment exists. Our project will apply cutting-edge technologies to study genes, proteins, and single cells in PG skin samples and compare them with other types of ulcers. By defining unique “molecular fingerprints” of PG, we aim to develop the first reliable diagnostic test, uncover disease subtypes, and identify new drug targets. This will allow earlier diagnosis, guide personalized therapy choices, and ultimately transform patient care.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Darier Disease (DD) is an incurable skin disease caused by pathogenic variants in one copy of a calcium pump called SERCA2, sometimes accompanied by neuropsychiatric symptoms and seizures. The disorder typically appears in teenagers and comes and goes in response to various forms of stress, resulting in painful lesions due to loss of epidermal tissue integrity, vulnerability to infection, and loss of self-esteem. Even though the underlying genetic basis of DD was discovered >25 years ago, treatments are still limited to non-specific drugs with distressing side effects, antibiotics, and behavior modification. We identified a unique vulnerability of DD cells caused by their failure to turn on a metabolic pathway that protects normal cells against stress. We aim to revive this protective pathway to restore normal metabolism in DD cells, and in so doing, enhance tissue integrity and the ability to repair DNA and prevent damage to the remaining good calcium pump.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Most vaccines and textbook models assume that special immune messengers called cytokines (such as IL‑6 or interferon‑α) are needed to tell T cells what to become. These cytokines are normally triggered by adjuvants in vaccines or by the immune system sensing pathogens. Our new findings overturn this view. We discovered that Langerhans cells—immune sentinels in the skin—can trigger strong antibody responses even in the steady state, when those cytokines are absent. Instead of relying on inflammatory messengers, they use surface “grip” proteins (integrins) to fine‑tune the conversation with T cells. This cytokine‑independent pathway may explain how the immune system quietly learns from the skin microbiome and maintains balance, while errors in this mechanism could underlie autoantibody diseases such as pemphigus or lupus. Our first goal is to confirm these findings. Once established, they will guide new strategies for vaccines or treatments that prevent chronic inflammatory skin disease.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Human skin pigmentation is highly variable among world populations and determines skin sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation, susceptibility to skin cancer, vitamin D production, and other outcomes. Much of this variability is determined by genetics. Using genetic analyses among diverse native Africans, we and our collaborators linked skin pigment variation with levels of expression of a gene called TMEM138. Inactivating mutations in TMEM138 or about 200 other genes cause developmental disorders called ciliopathies in which the primary cilium – a cell structure not known to impact pigmentation – fails to form properly. This proposal seeks to use cultured skin pigment cells called melanocytes and reconstituted human skin to better understand the molecular mechanisms by which TMEM138 specifically, and the primary cilium more generally, regulates pigment formation. Our study will provide new insights into skin pigment physiology and diseases and into how ciliopathy classes differ.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment, helping the body’s immune system attack tumors. Unfortunately, these powerful drugs often cause side effects when the immune system also attacks healthy tissues. The skin is one of the most commonly affected organs, leading to rashes and other painful conditions that can force patients to stop life-saving therapy. Our project aims to understand why this happens. We recently discovered that certain immune cells, called CD8 T cells, are activated by bacteria living on the skin and then attack healthy skin cells during treatment. We will study how these bacteria and immune cells interact and test new ways to prevent this process. By uncovering how microbes trigger skin damage, our research could pave the way for safer cancer immunotherapies, helping patients stay on treatment longer while avoiding harmful side effects.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) is a rare skin disease. Patients with PG have defects in their skin wound healing responses. Even minor injuries and cuts to the skin can form large chronic ulcers. PG ulcers are enriched with neutrophils, an immune cell type that plays a vital role in skin wound healing. Typically, neutrophils travel to the skin right after an injury, perform their tasks, and leave within a period of 3 days. Samreen Jatana wants to understand why PG neutrophils don’t perform their regular tasks and impair wound healing in skin. Samreen Jatana and her colleagues analyzed peripheral blood from patients with PG and identified a type of neutrophil in circulation with features of immature neutrophils that typically live in the bone marrow. They anticipate that this neutrophil subset cannot utilize energy properly and might be exhausted to perform its function. In this project, they will study this neutrophil subset to understand if it can be targeted therapeutically to treat PG.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Keloids are raised, inflamed scars that grow beyond the original wound, often becoming painful and disfiguring. They disproportionately affect African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian individuals, yet the biological reasons behind their formation remain unclear. Current treatments are limited, with high recurrence rates. George Agak’s research aims to uncover the molecular drivers of keloids by studying skin cells from keloid-prone individuals at the single-cell level. George Agak and his team focus on a key signaling pathway, the ACE-ASPN axis, which appears to promote inflammation and excessive scar formation. By using cutting-edge technologies like scRNA-seq, spatial-seq and advanced machine-learning tools, they will map how keloids develop across diverse skin types. Additionally, they will test whether angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs)—drugs already used for high blood pressure—can reduce keloid growth. The goal is to identify targeted treatments, leading to personalized therapies for those most affected.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Sclerodermatous chronic graft-versus-host disease is a common, debilitating side effect that can develop in patients who have undergone hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for blood cancer. It is challenging to treat and usually requires medications that suppress the immune system. One of the biggest challenges in treating patients with cGVHD is the lack of an accurate informative way for doctors to know if the skin is responding to therapy or is getting worse. In this project, Adela Cardones will use novel ultrasound technologies to measure changes in skin stiffness among cGVHD patients over a 1-year period. Adela Cardona and her team will compare this with using traditional clinical assessment, patient reported symptoms, and blood and skin markers of inflammation. If successful, this will allow them to better detect worsening or improvement of skin thickening and stiffness. This will ultimately lead to better care of patients and allow discovery of better treatments.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Leprosy remains a major public health challenge, with treatment becoming harder as drug-resistant Mycobacterium leprae strains emerge. While resistance is often linked to known mutations, some patients fail treatment without these mutations, suggesting unknown resistance mechanisms. Since M. leprae cannot be grown in a lab, Charlotte Avanzi studies it in living models to understand how genetic variations affect drug response. Charlotte Avanzi and her team have collected a large dataset of resistant strains studied in mice, revealing differences in growth and treatment response. Next, they will analyze their genomes to identify the genetic basis of these differences. Additionally, they will investigate genetic variations in M. leprae strains without known resistance but with distinct growth patterns. By uncovering hidden resistance mechanisms and genetic diversity, they aim to improve diagnostics, refine treatments, and guide future drug regimens, ensuring effective leprosy control worldwide.