Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2018

Geography: Austria

Atopic dermatitis (AD), the most common chronic inflammatory skin disease, typically starts very early in life.

While many patients outgrow their disease, some develop chronic disease for the rest of their lives. Mechanisms responsible, however, are completely unknown, and no biomarker exists that can predict the course of the disease.

Thus, we want to compare skin from young adults that have outgrown their AD, with skin from patients with active disease (namely normal appearing AD under topical glucocorticoid treatment, which can be expected to flare up again after cessation of treatment, thus harbouring a “disease memory”).

Skin from healthy control subjects will serve as baseline comparators. Due to low immune cell numbers in this type of tissue, we want to use in vivo suction blistering of AD patients to obtain (i) skin resident immune cells and (ii) skin proteins. Suction blister fluid will be analysed with low cytometry and single cell RNAseq (for cells) as well as a proteomic multiplex assays (OLINK) for soluble proteins. The blister roof (i.e. the epidermis) will also be harvested, and keratinocytes will be stored in liquid nitrogen for functional experiments.

Results obtained from flow cytometry, single cell RNAseq and proteomic approaches will then be used for such functional in vitro experiments (e.g. co-culturing, skin equivalents, stimulation experiments) in future research projects.

Overall, we hope that the identification of cellular and/or molecular factors influencing the natural course of AD could possibly identify targets for novel therapeutic approaches in AD, that could induce long term remission – or even lead to a cure – of AD.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Awards

Year: 2016

Geography: Austria

Presented to Dr. Thomas Wiesner. Dr. Wiesner is breaking new ground to find new mechanism-based cancer therapies. Following medical school, Dr. Wiesner wrote his thesis on the genomic aberrations of cutaneous lymphoma and completed his residency in dermatology at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. Dr. Wiesner spent five years conducting basic and translational research using cutting-edge techniques within high-throughput sequencing techniques in particular. His work within skin cancer research resulted in key discoveries, in particular concerning the genomic landscape of skin tumours.

Based on his experience as a physician-scientist and his access to high-quality clinical samples, Dr. Wiesner plans to combine high-throughput sequencing technologies, computational approaches and functional assays in order to define the relevant genomic and epigenomic aberrations in skin cancer and pave the way for new mechanism-based cancer therapies.

Grant category: Research Grants

Year: 2016

Geography: Austria

The Austrian-American team behind the study, led by Dr. Igor Vujic, aims at identifying more specific and sensitive biomarkers in order to better detect and monitor progression of malignant melanoma – a common and deadly skin cancer that is difficult to treat, and that accounts for numerous deaths each year.

In the clinic, physicians face two main problems around malignant melanoma: detection of early disease, and monitoring of disease progression, recurrence and its response to therapies. The existing melanoma biomarkers are not very specific and only rarely help.

Melanoma cells, however, produce a specific set of RNA molecules of which some are excreted and found in the blood stream – ready for identification and use as biomarkers. Recent technical advances make it possible to extract and analyse serum RNA and identify the cell of origin.

The team will mainly concentrate on non-coding RNAs, a new class of molecules known to be very specific for certain diseases such as cancer. Preliminary studies have identified and confirmed 237 interesting candidates through RNA-Seq TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) data.

In the course of the study, the team will perform RNA-Seq studies on serum samples from melanoma patients and healthy individuals to find differences in RNA quality and quantity to be used as melanoma serum-markers. The team will moreover test changes of the amount of these specific RNA molecules in melanoma patients over time to discover if they can be used as disease progression biomarkers.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Awards

Year: 2012

Geography: Austria

Presented to Assistant Professor David Schrama at the Dermatology Department at Graz Medical University, Austria.

Schrama’s research focuses on melanoma biology. His research team currently analyses the impact of genetic diversity among patients and tumours on prognosis and clinical outcome of therapies. In recent years, Schrama’s scientific work has focused on unravelling the biology of another skin cancer; the polyomavirus associated merkel cell carcinoma.