Funding opens door to new treatments for autoimmune blistering disease

Funding awarded to WIMR’s Associate Professor Joanne Reed and her team will seek to uncover the causes of treatment resistance in autoimmune blistering disease, with the aim of improving treatment outcomes and monitoring of patients with autoimmune skin diseases.

The funding has been awarded by Danish-based philanthropic organisation, the LEO Foundation, and will allow the WIMR team to access patient biopsies from volunteers treated at Westmead Hospital, and to use cutting-edge technology from WIMR’s PrecisionGO™ to uncover the molecular mechanisms that drive individual patient responses to therapy.

Autoimmune bullous skin diseases are a group of conditions caused by the body’s immune system attacking the skin, causing blisters and erosions.

“Less than 50% of patients achieve durable clinical remission with current treatments. Most patients experience ongoing relapses of painful blisters and erosions of the skin and mucosa, which can progress to significant organ damage and dysfunction,” says Associate Professor Ming Wei Lin, a co-investigator on the study and clinical immunologist at Westmead Hospital.

“By studying the cellular and molecular networks in the skin and mucosa of patients with different treatment responses, we aim to identify what drives the disease and discover how these drivers can be therapeutically targeted to treat and prevent autoimmune bullous diseases,” says Associate Professor Reed.

The WIMR team will leverage cutting-edge technologies, single cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics with its well-characterised and treatment-standardised patient cohort to identify the cellular and molecular drivers of disease. Analyses of longitudinal skin and mucosal biopsies, blood and nasal swabs will be correlated with treatment responses in individual patients.

Associate Professor Reed says, “We are very grateful to the LEO Foundation for this important funding. This support will allow us to identify the underlying drivers of disease and treatment resistance in patient skin and mucosa. It will pave the way for personalised treatment approaches, enabling better therapeutic selection, reducing relapses, and revealing new therapeutic targets for patients who fail to achieve clinical remission.”