Background and current state of research
Psoriasis affects about 25 million people in North America and Europe, and is probably the most prevalent immune-mediated skin disease in adults. It is an organ-specific autoimmune disease that is triggered by an activated cellular immune system. Psoriasis is essentially a disease of Caucasians, in whom its frequency is 1–2%.It is commonly thought of as a complex trait. So far, between 10 and 20 chromosome regions have been proposed to harbor psoriasis genes but less than a handful of genes have been identified.
Our goals
Using GWAS approach we will identify new risk Loci responsible for psoriasis in Egyptian population and compare it to those already found in German population. We will also compare the microbiota of the skin between the two populations. In addition we will investigate the function of a novel gene we have recently found to be associated with a familial psoriasis.
How to get there
By applying Next Generation Sequencing application we will try to identify new susceptibly loci of psoriasis in Egyptians. We also apply different ex vivo experiments to define the effect of the found gene variants on gene functions and disease pathways.