Pieter Spee
Chief Technology Officer FIBROTX Innovations for skin Europe
Title: Towards skin point-of care devices for personalized skin treatment based on non-invasive biomarker measurements directly from the skin surface
Biography
Biography: Pieter Spee
Abstract
Diagnosis of chronic skin inflammation is largely performed by visual assessment, for instance by judging the shape, pattern, position, thickness, redness and scaling of skin lesions on the body. These phenotypic characteristics are typically end-products of the underlying biological processes responsible for disease. Despite the unquestionable value of visual assessment for treatment decisions and patient monitoring, more detailed analyses methods are needed for answering the unmet medical need for offering personalized medicine to patients, e.g., methods that can be used for selection as well as fine-tuning of treatment. Proteins that play a crucial role in skin inflammation, such as cytokines and chemokines, form the molecular root of inflammation and thus have tremendous value for catering personalized medicine in the form of biomarkers. Skin biomarker measurements are typically performed on skin material obtained through invasive procedures and analyses are typically costly and elaborate. FibroTx TAP and SELF are novel molecular diagnostic platform technologies for biomarker measurements directly from skin. These platform technologies are currently being tested in clinical studies for the development of skin diagnostic tools that can objectively assess the disease activity status of skin lesions. The aim of the studies is to develop practical point-of-care devices that can markedly improve skin treatment, which is cost-efficient and does not require the need for extensive clinical laboratory expertise.