Psoriasis is one of the most prevalent of all autoimmune diseases and the second most common skin diseases, the first being acne. 125 million people worldwide (2% to 3% of the total population) have psoriasis. Psoriasis is not a cosmetic problem. Nearly 60% of sufferers report their disease to be a large problem in their everyday life.
Currently there is restricted access to psoriatic lesions from human donors for research use. This is mainly due to the fact that psoriatic skin is not normally removed surgically as part of the medical treatment for the condition. Therefore in order to perform essential research on psoriatic skin, the only option is to ask patients to voluntarily donate skin biopsies, which are taken out with their normal treatment.
Tissue Solutions now has UK ethical approval in place to collect biopsies from psoriasis patients. We can provide biopsies from lesions and normal skin from the same donor in either fresh or frozen formats. All samples will be fully anonymised and only donor data pertinent to the disease will accompany the samples such as age, gender, smoking, drinking and recreational drug habits, relatives with psoriasis, date of on-set, history of disease, severity of the disease, sampling site of each biopsy, history of treatment, other auto-immune disease, other co-morbidities such as diabetes, depression, etc.
We can provide these samples on a prospective basis for our clients working on pre-clinical drug discovery and drug development supporting:
- Diagnostics
- Biomarkers research for evaluating drug efficacy and toxicology
- Xenograft models of psoriasis
- Translational medicine
For further information and to discuss your project requirements please contact us.