Scientific Focus

Clinical Research

Chronic inflammatory skin diseases are a constant burden to patients, affecting quality of life with an increased social and economic impact. Two major skin diseases are psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, currently affecting 1% to 2% of the population, reaching up to 10% for atopic dermatitis in infants. Its prevalence is constantly rising and associated with a western lifestyle. Recent development of new therapeutics resulted in improved treatment options with reduced side effects. These drugs include specific monoclonal antibodies and small molecules as pathway inhibitors. However, it remains unclear which drug suits individual patient best. In addition, development of new drugs is hindered by lack of biomarkers associated with treatment success.

The Center for Chronic Inflammatory Medicine (CCIM) as a leading institute of the Cluster for Precision Medicine, aims to identify and develop novel biomarkers and therapeutics for a personalized medicine. Due to our strong efforts in the clinical demonstrator 1 cluster we are able to directly identify patient clusters and investigate new biomarkers. To do so we use state of the art multi-omic approaches combined with patient specific profiles, ultimately resulting in a personalized medicine.

Strong collaborations have led to the foundation of the Center for Research on Inflammation of the Skin (CRIS). In here multiple research teams will build a world-leading research institute on inflammation of the skin.

Biomarkers

In several completed and ongoing clinical trials, patients are treated with novel, approved drugs, such as IL-17, IL-23, or TNF-α blockers. Of these patients we determine clinical, genetic and immunologic information. In addition, we established multiple non-invasive methods, which provide information about microbiome and virome of the skin, skin transcriptome, and anti-microbial peptides. In collaboration with others these multi-omic data are being analyzed. This allows us to obtain information about treatment success, identification of patient clusters suitable for a specific drug, and discovery of new biomarkers to determine clinical endpoints.