Summer Student 2017: Bronte Munro

Bronte Munro, supervised by Dr Jelena Gavrilovic at the University of East Anglia, investigated the causes of atopic dermatitis and psoriasis using cell culture, to replace experiments on mice.

Atopic dermatitis is a common chronic skin condition which results from over-activation of the body’s defences (called inflammation). Currently the best treatments are steroid creams, which are effective but long term use can lead to skin thinning. Sadly, many mice are used in atopic dermatitis or psoriasis research and often experiments involve human skin equivalents being painfully grown onto their skin.

In her summer project, Bronte refined a model that uses waste skin from surgical procedures to recreate the type of inflammation characteristic of atopic dermatitis. She used this model to understand what happens to the immune cells that cause inflammation in the skin. This refined system could allow scientists to test new treatments in the future and therefore lead to new ways to treat atopic dermatitis, without using animals.

Page last modified on June 13, 2019 12:19 pm