Improving our understanding of role of the immune system in psoriasis

Summary

This research project will improve our understanding of the role of the immune system in psoriasis, and aims to develop new treatments. Psoriasis is a common chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects about 1 million people in Britain. No cure is available at the moment. Present treatments alleviate the symptoms but are often accompanied by considerable side effects.

What causes psoriasis is not known at present, but recent data indicate that a dysregulation of the immune system plays a major role in psoriasis development. There is also accumulating evidence that treatments targeted at components of the immune system in psoriasis might be beneficial to patients.

Our research group has been working for many years in the field of understanding the causes of psoriasis and finding new treatments.

We aim to better understand the differences between normal skin/blood and psoriatic skin/blood, e.g. which cells of the immune system can be found in psoriatic plaques that are absent in normal skin. We also want to find new targets for treatment in psoriasis and test them in relevant model systems. For this reason we need to obtain blood samples from healthy volunteers.

Participation: For this study we recruited 35 volunteers from the Cambridge BioResource to provide a 50ml blood sample and complete a questionnaire. 

Organisation: This study is organised by Professor Frank Nestle from King's College London.