Skin diseases and complex wounds are among the most common, chronic and quality-of-life-reducing conditions in the UK. Greater Manchester is served by the largest UK clinical dermatology department.
Capitalising upon our global leadership and links with other Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Themes and Newcastle and Bristol BRCs, we address three core questions across our five programmes:
- What are the common pathways driving selected inflammatory skin diseases and wound healing?
- Can we predict disease course and therapeutic response?
- Can we target mechanisms to optimise skin condition prophylaxis and management?
Our five programmes are based on local and national research needs and on our clinical and research strengths. They are:
Complex wounds
Complex wounds, including leg ulcers and open surgical wounds, heal slowly. We want to explore whether factors about people, their wounds, and their care can independently predict wound healing, to allow us to identify patients who are at risk of not healing and support further treatment choices.
Inflammatory hair disease
Inflammatory hair diseases, such as alopecia areata and frontal fibrosing alopecia, are common causes of patchy hair loss. We want to identify universal, safe medications that work for inflammatory alopecia, find ways to identify patient groups at risk of relapse and explore whether early treatment can positively influence longer term prognosis.
Photodermatoses
Photodermatoses are inflammatory conditions of the skin which are caused or aggravated by low levels of sunlight exposure. As leaders in ongoing research in this field, we want to find out how individual photodermatoses are caused, develop new treatments, and repurpose existing treatments.
Psoriasis
Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease that leads to red, brown, or dark brown thickened skin in many areas on the body. We want to use information about the genetics of people with psoriasis to develop new therapies and find out which medications work best for which patients, so we can give people the treatment which is most likely to work for them.
Skin cancer
Non-melanoma skin cancers are one of the most common type of cancer. We will look at how sunlight and immune changes affect the development of skin cancer, and develop systems to help identify those at high risk.