Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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 in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Chronic skin wounds and burns are major healthcare challenges, often healing slowly and leading to infections, pain, and high medical costs. Sine Hadrup’s project focuses on an enzyme that may worsen inflammation and delay healing of the injured skin. Sine Hardrup and her team will use artificial intelligence-driven protein design to create a small protein inhibitor (miBd) that blocks the enzyme, preventing its harmful effects. First, they will test whether miBds can bind and stop enzyme activity. Then, they will evaluate their impact on wound healing using human cell culture. Finally, they will test them in a pig skin model, as pig skin closely resembles human skin. Burns are introduced on the pig skin and treated topically with or without the miBds. If successful, this research could lead to new treatment options for wound healing and inflammatory skin diseases like psoriasis, offering better patient outcomes and faster recovery times.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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 in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: France

The skin is the body’s primary barrier against physical insults and microbial pathogens. It also functions as an active immune organ, both in its homeostatic state and during inflammation. Understanding of mechanisms underlying cutaneous immunity and how they contribute to tolerogenic or immunogenic signaling pathways, is crucial to develop therapeutic strategies for different skin diseases. For example, efforts have been made to develop immunotherapy to induce immune tolerance in allergies and autoimmune disorders. Mei Li’s study is based on recent identification of a key regulatory pathway in promoting skin immune tolerance. Mei Li and her team’s objective is to delineate the nature and function of this new regulatory pathway across AD, allergies and vitiligo to develop proof-of-concepts to raise new immunotherapy strategies. The mechanisms and targets discovered in this study may also be applicable to other inflammatory skin diseases.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

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.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: United Kingdom

Medicated creams and ointments are used to treat millions of people every day. Despite this, inconsistent drug delivery remains a long-standing issue. While Finlay’s Fingertip Unit was introduced in 1973 to address this gap, there is still a challenge in delivering consistent doses of topical medicines for small lesions, such as those seen in paediatrics. This issue is particularly relevant today with the introduction of incredibly potent topical medicines. Oisín Kavanagh’s project aims to design an adjustable adapter that enables patients to accurately control the amount of medication they apply to their skin. During the design process, Oisín Kavanagh and his team will collaborate with patients and their carers to ensure that this product meets their needs.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

There are currently almost 40 million people globally living with HIV (PLWH) and they face life-threatening allergic skin reactions to medications up to 100 times more often than the general population, yet these conditions remain poorly understood – especially in those with darker skin. Elizabeth Phillips will use a biorepository with samples from more than 500 cases of severe cutaneous adverse reactions (SCAR) to create a detailed HIV skin immune atlas. Using single-cell sequencing and spatial mapping, Elizabeth Phillips and her team will develop understanding at a single cell level of how HIV alters skin immunity in both healthy and inflamed skin and its role in driving SCAR such as drug reaction with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS) and Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis (EN). They will identify new ways to diagnose, treat, or prevent SCAR. The project will improve HIV, allergy, and dermatology care while highlighting Africa’s critical role in global health innovation.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Skin pathology in Scleroderma (SSc) involves activated and senescent myofibroblast accumulation, yet their mechanistic role remains unclear, and effective treatments are lacking. Intestinal microorganisms influence SSc pathogenesis, with altered homeostasis and function in patients. These microorganisms produce the pungent trimethylamine (TMA), which is then converted to trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) via an enzymatic reaction catalyzed by hepatic flavin-like monooxygenase (FMO3). Together, these observations implicate FMO3 and the gut-TMA-TMAO axis in both fibrotic and vascular pathology in SSc; however, the pathogenic roles of FMO3 in SSc and its mechanism have never been investigated. Here Priyanka Verma will use human samples, cell cultures and animal models to test the hypothesis that FMO3 is an important player in SSc. Better understanding of the role of FMO3, and its regulation of the gut microbiome-TMAO axis in the pathogenesis of SSc could lead to innovative treatment strategies.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Millions of people suffer from chronic skin diseases like psoriasis, vitiligo, and alopecia areata, which follow frustrating cycles of treatment, improvement, and relapse. These relapses occur because certain immune cells, called tissue-resident memory T cells, remain hidden in the skin even after symptoms disappear, ready to trigger inflammation again. Christoph Ellebrecht has discovered that these immune cells depend on highly efficient protein production to survive in the challenging, resource-limited skin environment. Christoph Ellebrecht and his team will investigate when and where this protein production efficiency becomes essential for these cells, how it helps them adapt to the skin, and test whether targeting this process can selectively eliminate these cells while preserving normal immune function outside of the skin. This research could lead to new treatments that provide long-lasting remission for chronic inflammatory skin diseases, significantly improving quality of life for millions of patients worldwide.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: Denmark

Multiple common skin diseases, like psoriasis, are characterized by excessive inflammation of the affected skin. This causes itching and pain and makes wound healing difficult. Thus, skin inflammation is of general discomfort for the affected patients. Anti-inflammatory drugs, for example inhibitors of the TNF signaling pathway, are highly successful in the clinic for some but not all types of skin inflammation. Rune Hartmann’s project aims at a better understanding of the underlying causes of skin inflammation and how to develop better drugs in the future. Furthermore, Rune Hartmann and his team are investigating how the same signaling pathway can drive skin inflammation and thus cause pathology, while being a critical part of healthy skin development. This is critical to understand how to target future drugs specifically towards the pathological inflammation and avoid unwanted side effects.