Skin Translational Research

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PROJECT SUMMARY The Skin Translational Research (STaR) Core aims to foster innovative and pathophysiologically relevant skin biology and disease research by facilitating experiments using human primary samples. Fresh human skin and primary skin cells are highly valuable resources that help to extend skin research throughout the larger scientific community at our institution, evidenced by the large number of investigators outside the Department of Dermatology who have previously used our Core services and subsequently submitted new abstracts, publications, and grant applications on skin biology. By combining highly utilized primary tissue services with innovative tissue engineering, high-throughput screening, and biobanking consultation and services, STaR Core aims to maximize our impact within an even broader scientific community. Our long-term objectives are to: (1) allow investigators both within and outside the Department of Dermatology to conduct research on skin biology more efficiently and effectively by centralizing high-volume or specialized technical services and providing the critical research infrastructure and institutional review board approvals for their use; (2) foster innovative exploratory projects and junior investigators in skin biology through our core services, with the goal of promoting new scientific collaborations, abstracts, manuscripts, and grants; (3) promote translational research by providing access to normal and diseased human skin samples that might not otherwise be available to non-physicians or have substantial administrative barriers to their use; and (4) integrate our core directors’ research expertise into future core services to adapt to the emerging needs and opportunities of our membership. To accomplish these goals we aim to: 1) Accelerate novel pathway discovery through both targeted investigations of candidate pathways as well as unbiased high-throughput screening assays in primary human skin cells; 2) Enable 3-dimensional skin biology and disease modeling through ex vivo human skin cultures, organotypic skin cultures, and human skin xenografts; and 3) Promote research using well- annotated skin biospecimens by establishing the Penn Dermatology BioBank, which includes both normal and diseased human skin samples, with or without paired blood samples, including linked clinical and genetic data.