BIOMAP

A study by IMI project BIOMAP showed that the type - and amount - of food you eat influences the bacteria that live on your skin, as do smoking, education and even time spent outside.###

BIOMAP is working to understand the underlying mechanisms of the skin diseases atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. Human skin is teeming with bacteria, an essential element for skin health but also linked to disease when imbalanced. The BIOMAP team set out to investigate any potential links between a person’s physical traits, lifestyle and their environment, with their skin bacteria. To do so, they gathered skin samples from 647 people and profiled their skin bacteria by DNA sequencing. They were able to confirm established links between the skin microbiota and skin microenvironment, age, body mass index and sex. More intriguingly, they found that dietary macronutrients and total dietary energy were associated with several specific bacterium types, as were smoking, alcohol consumption, skin pH, skin type, trans-epidermal water loss, education and certain environmental conditions and lifestyle factors, such as hours spent outdoors.

This expands our current understanding of what influences skin bacterial community and its makeup. The researchers hypothesise that the skin microenvironment, coupled with host physiology, shapes skin bacteria to a greater extent than with a single skin physiological feature, lifestyle and environmental exposure. In other words, no single environmental or behavioural aspect appears to have a major impact. Future clinical research involving skin microbiota, they say, should acknowledge these associations.

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Despite a relatively good choice of treatment options for inflammatory skin diseases like psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, finding a drug that definitely works in a given patient is still very much trial and error. The BIOMAP project, which launched in 2019, will carry out the biggest study yet of the molecular drivers of inflammatory skin diseases, with particular focus on psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, in an effort to uncover tell-tale biomarkers that will help predict the course of the disease, and the response to therapy. ###As a first step, BIOMAP is bringing together data from previous and ongoing clinical studies to create a large data platform capable of delivering sound results.

Having spent the first year of the project making sure their data collections adhere to stringent rules governing patient data privacy, the project partners have now started uploading the datasets to their central data platform.

‘The datasets are being harmonised according to what we call our ‘glossary’, so that the nomenclature and phrasing is the same across all cohorts, and that key information is available from all of them,’ says project coordinator Stephan Weidinger of the University Hospital in Kiel, Germany. He gives a simple example to illustrate why this is necessary: ‘It starts with the disease name itself. In some studies, the disease is called ‘atopic dermatitis’, and in other studies, it’s ‘atopic eczema’. And then there are studies where is called just ‘eczema’.’ The diagnostic criteria can also vary from study to study. ‘So, we have to check that and make it clear what criteria has been used and to which degree it is comparable.’

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