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UC Irvine promotes interdisciplinary approach to skin biology, disease research
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The University of California, Irvine, recently announced plans to create the UCI Skin Biology Resource-based Center, which will provide research infrastructure, shared facilities and services to groups of investigators studying skin biology and diseases.
Bogi Andersen, MD, professor of medicine and biological chemistry at the UCI School of Medicine, is leading the charge, and he spoke about the center’s collaborative efforts and goals with Healio Dermatology.
“Our vision is that skin researchers will work jointly with scientists from other fields such as mathematics, computer science and engineering to gain new insights,” Andersen said.
Throughout the last 3 years, Andersen and a group of investigators and professors “laid the groundwork” and prepared the P30 grant application for the NIH to fund the center, Andersen said.
“We have a strong interactive group of UC Irvine investigators focusing on the biology and diseases of skin. We were interested in coordinating this effort and in providing additional support to this group of investigators,” he said.
The group received seed funding from the university in 2015 to help organize the effort, which resulted in a successful application to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases that was funded in April.
The overall goal of the center is to define regulatory mechanisms that affect the function and diseases of the skin, Andersen said.
“Specifically, we are promoting interdisciplinary approaches to answer questions in skin biology and diseases. Our goal is also to draw investigators from other fields into skin research. The work will get done through resource cores in genomics-bioinformatics, imaging and systems biology. We will be sponsoring a recurrent seminar series, a yearly symposium and providing seed funding to test new ideas,” he said. – by Abigail Sutton
Disclosure: Andersen reports he is employed by the University of California, Irvine. His research is funded by the NIH.