The skin acts as a protective shield that prevents water loss and keeps harmful substances and germs out. In people with eczema, this protective barrier does not function properly, but the reasons why are still not completely understood.
This thesis combines biology, physics, and computer-based data analysis to better understand how the skin barrier is formed and maintained. It identifies an important molecular pathway that helps skin cells mature into a healthy protective barrier. It also introduces a new, non-invasive way to measure the barrier of laboratory-grown human skin, making animal-free skin models more useful for research. Finally, by studying individual skin cells from people with eczema, this thesis shows that a previously unrecognized population of stem cell-like skin cells may contribute to disease development.
Together, these findings improve our understanding of the skin barrier in healthy and eczema skin, improve the use of animal-free laboratory models, and reveal potential new targets for eczema treatment.
Felicitas Pardow (born in 1994) studied Molecular Medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and at the University of Barcelona. In 2019, she started a shared doctoral research program in the Department of Dermatology and the Department of Molecular Biology at the Radboudumc. She afterwards worked in multiple research management positions with the focus on affordable drug development and pandemic preparedness.