Post Summary
Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic skin disease which dramatically lessens patient quality of life and affects over 1% of Irish people. HS is characterised by the occlusion and rupture of hair follicles leading to flaring chronic inflammation which involves innate immune cell activation and Th1/Th17 driven disease pathology. The etiology of the disease is unclear, and a major limitation is the lack of an effective model to study the disease with research entirely reliant on invasive and scarce patient biopsies.
This project seeks to establish an 3D organotypic skin culture model in TBSI as a platform to design a scalable in vitro model of HS. After establishing a fibroblast-keratinocyte co-culture model, we will use it to design larger funding proposals which will incorporate insights from new single cell and spatial transcriptomic datasets, available publicly and through collaborators, to accurately reproduce different cell states at different disease stages via pharmacological and/or genetic intervention. This novel approach will allow us to faithfully reproduce the critical aspects of biology HS in a controllable setting. This and future projects will allow us to study disease initiation, progression and therapeutic targeting in collaboration with our PPI partners in the advocacy group HS Ireland.
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