Human Skin Disease Resource-based Center

Project Summary/Abstract: Overall Component Mouse models have provided many biologic insights and remain the most popular system in which to conduct skin disease research. However. there are significant differences between the skin and immune systems of mice and humans and these differences are incompletely characterized, making it difficult to know if observations made in mice will hold true in humans. Research carried out on human cells and tissues can address this knowledge gap. Human biobanks and powerful new analytic techniques have become available that make high-quality human skin disease research accessible. The goals of this Center are to accelerate human skin disease research by providing researchers at any institution with access to human specimens and cutting edge analytic techniques and to bring new diverse investigators into the field of human skin disease research. We include 45 research projects from investigators who wish to utilize Center services; however, any researcher wishing to carry out human skin disease research is a potential member of the research community. The Center is composed of an Administrative Core and three Resource Cores. The Administrative Core manages and oversees all activities of the Center and administers Diversity and Outreach activities, including funding for diverse investigators at multiple stages of training and the biennial International Conference on Human Skin Disease. The Human Tissues Biobank Core provides access to over 113,000 highly characterized consented patients, over 1.5 million banked pathologic specimens, both searchable by diagnosis, as well as to fresh human skin, purified cell populations from human skin and immunodeficient mice grafted with human skin and blood. The Single Cell and Immunoanalysis Core provides access to single cell RNA and ATAC sequencing, flow cytometry-based single cell imaging, mass cytometry by time of flight (CyTOF) and high throughput TCR sequencing. The Next Generation Tissue Analysis & Imaging Core provides access to six color tyramide amplification based immunostaining combined with spectral imaging and automated cell analysis, NanoString RNA and DNA profiling and Digital Spatial Profiling, a state-of-the-art technique that that can profile expression of 10-1000s of protein or RNA targets in FFPE and frozen sections. In summary, the Center provides access to biobanks and cutting-edge human analytic techniques that enable translational researchers to carry out high quality human skin disease research.