Peter Morawski, PhD, is a 2023 National Scleroderma Foundation research grant recipient, and is on a quest to find better treatments for autoimmune diseases that affect the skin, like scleroderma.
As part of his research project, Cutaneous T Cell Dependent Regulation of Scleroderma-associated Fibroblasts, Dr. Morawski sought to better understand how T cells can influence other skin cells like structural fibroblasts, to identify novel pathways to target for future therapeutics.
This exploration starts with some important questions: How do T cells interact with other skin cells? What’s the difference between T cells that live in the skin and those that move between the skin and the blood? How are these interactions supposed to work in healthy skin – and what goes wrong in diseases like psoriasis and scleroderma?
Dr. Morawski and Hannah DeBerg, PhD, built an “atlas” that answers many of these questions and details how immune cells in healthy skin behave.
“For years, skin diseases were studied through the blood, spleen or lymph nodes, but the skin is where the action happens,” Dr. Morawski said. “We now have better tools and technologies to collect and study actual human skin cells, which provides the most insight into skin diseases.”
Dr. Morawski and Dr. DeBerg used skin cells from these samples to create a roadmap and answer some critical unknown features of the skin.
“One of the most interesting findings was that the T cells that move in and out of the skin tend to be the main drivers of inflammation,” Dr. Morawski said. “As opposed to the T cells that live in the skin long-term, which tend to be involved in fostering basic skin functions.”
Learn more about Dr. Morawski’s work in the Benaroya Research Institute Autoimmune Life blog.