Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Optimizing treatment of psoriasis

Fellowship theme: Systems Medicine in Dermatology

Nikolai Loft’s project is dedicated to revolutionizing the treatment of psoriasis by personalizing approaches based on individual patient characteristics and needs. The focus is on determining the underlying reasons why some patients experience a loss in the effectiveness of their treatment and whether treatment of psoriasis can prevent the onset of psoriatic arthritis (PsA). By identifying predictive markers for these conditions, Nikolai Loft’s project aims to tailor treatment plans that maintain effectiveness over time and mitigate the risk of PsA and thereby improve patient outcomes substantially.

Nikolai Loft plans to identify markers that can predict loss of treatment response in patients with psoriasis and markers that can predict development of PsA. The project will capitalize on Denmark’s unique data infrastructure integrating national registries with bioresources. This will involve thorough characterization using existing registry data and additional in-depth immunological and genetic profiling using new biological samples from more than 1000 patients with psoriasis. Additionally, Nikolai Loft and his research group will, based on these findings, assess the PsA protective properties of treatments of psoriasis. The end goal is to develop models that can identify patients at risk of treatment failure or developing PsA enabling adjustments of treatment strategies to mitigate these risks.

Nikolai Loft hopes to be able to reduce the incidence of treatment failure and enhance the quality of life for individuals with psoriasis by enabling more stable and effective treatment regimens. By doing so, he hopes to decrease healthcare costs associated with switching therapies. In the long term, by preventing PsA, this research project seeks to reduce the overall burden of psoriasis and its complications. Ultimately, tailoring treatment to the individual patient’s needs.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

Project title: Uncoupling the contribution of systemic and site-specific immunity in inflammatory skin disorders

Fellowship theme: Advanced Therapeutics Research in Skin Diseases

Patients with skin diseases can often suffer from other conditions like asthma, arthritis and inflammatory diseases of the intestines, suggesting that these diseases may be linked by a common cause. Importantly, there is currently no tool that can be used in the clinic to measure skin disease activity regularly. In the skin, resident memory T cells (TRM) can reside for years, providing protection to old and new infections, but at times, causing inflammatory skin diseases. A portion of these cells are thought to migrate through our bodies via the blood and there is the possibility that these inflammatory T cells can land in other organs and cause disease. Finding these rather rare inflammatory T cells has been difficult.

Wenning Zheng’s research project will focus on using the blood of healthy people and patients with eczema, psoriasis, and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) to find these rare aggressive T cells. Using sensitive new assays and building on her expertise as a computational immunologist, her group at LEO Foundation Skin Immunology Research Center will employ high resolution single cell T cell clones sequencing on donor-matched blood and tissues to understand the propensity for T cells to circulate from the skin, through the blood and into other organs. Since T cells quite specifically recognize antigens through a highly-diverse receptor on their cell surface, Wenning will characterize the diversity of these receptors and combine machine learning and wet-lab methods to identify the nature of antigens that are detected by T cells. It is hoped that by understanding the precise antigens that T cells see, we can develop tools to diagnose and treat skin diseases with greater precision.

Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

The science center Experimentarium in Copenhagen will open a major exhibition about the human body in 2026. The exhibition is called Super-krop!, which means Super body, and aims to illustrate the interaction between the body and behavior, targeting a younger audience.

Super-krop! is supported by the LEO Foundation alongside the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, and Ole Kirk’s Foundation with a total of DKK 30 million.

Grant category: Serendipity Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: USA

Ya-Chieh Hsu’s project investigates the mechanisms behind the unexpected observation that wound healing slows upon increased innervation of the surrounding tissue.

During testing of a virus-based tool designed to genetically manipulate skin cells Ya-Chieh Hsu and her team serendipitously discovered that increased innervation at a wound site slows healing and leads to increased scarring. This discovery suggests that wound-induced hyper-innervation may be important in driving scarring and fibrosis.

Grant category: Serendipity Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: United Kingdom

Shoba Amarnath’s project will investigate an unexpected link between regulatory T cells and the development of psoriatic arthritis (PsA).

In Shoba Amarnath’s original studies, based on her LEO Foundation Award in 2019, she sought to understand the role of immune cells in melanoma. As part of these investigations and to compare immune responses between cancer and autoimmunity, Shoba serendipitously found, through single-cell RNA and protein level analysis, that regulatory T cell (Treg) communication pathways with unconventional immune cells were significantly disrupted in psoriatic arthritis (PsA). This unbiased deep phenotyping specifically revealed a novel Treg specific regulatory mechanism in autoimmunity, especially crosstalk with osteoclast precursors (OCPs). It also has identified new targetable proteins in diseases where there is significant bone loss.

Grant category: Serendipity Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: USA

Philip Scumpia’s project will investigate a surprising discovery that links gender to differences in immune responses.

Philip Scumpia and his team created new formulations of biomaterials intended to improve cutaneous wound healing and decrease size of scars in his current LEO Foundation-funded project. While evaluating the immunological mechanisms, Philip and his team observed considerable variability in immune cell recruitment to the different hydrogels. After careful scrutiny they realized this variability was entirely due to the fact that female mice developed stronger immune responses to the hydrogel than male mice. Strikingly, female mice displayed a much earlier and more severe skin inflammation in other mouse models studied in the laboratory includingeczema, psoriasis, and sunburn.

Grant category: Serendipity Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: USA

Nathan Archer’s project investigates the surprising finding that dermal adipocytes and their crosstalk with eosinophils may play an important role in the development of atopic dermatitis.

The aim of Nathan Archer’s original project was to investigate the role of eosinophils, a type of immune cell, in the pronounced bacterial dysbiosis seen in relation to atopic dermatitis (AD). During those studies, Nathan Archer and his team serendipitously discovered an unexpected interaction of adipocytes with eosinophils in the skin, which was also associated with skin inflammation. This novel link will be investigated in Nathan’s project.

Grant category: Serendipity Grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Belgium

Esther Hoste’s project aims to elucidate the role of regulated cell death in adipocytes in relation to injury repair.

In preliminary studies, funded by her LEO Foundation Award in 2022, and investigating keratinocytes in injury repair, Esther Hoste and her team, to their surprise, observed cell death executioner events in adipocytes, implicating lytic and non-lytic adipocyte death in skin wound healing. While adipocyte plasticity is documented as an integral part of skin repair, little is known about the pathways mediating this process. However, rebuilding the adipocyte layer is crucial for restoring skin function after injury.

Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2024

Geography: Japan

To strengthen the interactions between young scientists a collegiality night and a symposium are arranged in conjunction with the 49th annual meeting of the Japanese Society for Investigative Dermatology (JSID).

The mission of JSID  is to advance the position of dermatology in the interdisciplinary world and to enhance the quality of science and research presentations in dermatology for the purposes of maintaining healthy skin and further advancing the treatment of skin diseases.

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Grant category: Standalone grants

Year: 2024

Geography: Denmark

The overall vision with this research project is to improve skin health and the quality of prevention and treatment of skin diseases in Greenland and the Arctic societies in general. Around 25% of all inquiries to the health care system in Greenland relate to skin diseases. Arctic indigenous peoples have their own genetic variation and have for centuries adapted to their unique geographical environments and culture. Consequently, medical treatment regimens from other countries most often cannot be directly transferred and used in the Greenlandic health care setting. New knowledge, competences and technologies are warranted for utilization across both prevention, translational and clinical research, and practice.

20% of the Greenlandic population is employed in the fishing industry which stands for 90% of Greenland’s export, making it a critical element in a sustainable community. It is expected that around 30-50% of the employees suffer from hand eczema, often with complicating secondary bacterial infection. As such, contact dermatitis has a significant negative impact on both quality of life and productivity in Greenland.  The research project aims to provide some of the missing research data on skin diseases in Greenland. It will investigate the prevalence of contact dermatitis, risk factors, biomarkers, and genetic factors associated with contact dermatitis in the seafood-processing fishing industry, as well as explore the presence of bacterial strains and how they relate to dermatitis.