Alopecia areata
Alopecia areata is one of the most common auto-immune diseases in humans. In this disease, auto-reactive T cells attack the hair follicle and lead to a non-scarring hair loss. This means, that even if the disease is active for many years, hair regrowth can be achieved by targeting this immune response. Its clinical appearance ranges from from small circumscribed patchy areas (patch type AA), to complete scalp (alopecia totalis, AT) and body hair loss (alopecia universalis, AU). While this hair loss is “harmless”, the impact on patients’ quality of life can be severe.
Despite our comparably good understanding of this disease, there are key questions that remain to be answered. For example, all currently approved drugs lead to a response in only 40% of patients. We aim to identify why a subset of patients do not respond and try to find potentially predictive markers to identify patients best suited for specific therapies.
Additionally, we commonly observe patients responding to treatment in certain parts of the scalp, while other areas stay bald. Immunologically, these differences are not yet understood.
In this project we again rely on a number of ‘omics technologies to tackle these immunological questions.