Treatment significantly reduces symptoms of psoriasis in mice

Wednesday, July 22, 2020 - 15:01 in Health & Medicine

Psoriasis, a chronic skin condition that causes itchy, red, scaly patches, afflicts more than 8 million Americans and 125 million people worldwide. Small molecule-based drugs like steroids can penetrate the skin to treat the condition, but they can cause skin irritation and thinning and their efficacy can decrease over time. Antibodies that target specific inflammation-related molecules associated with psoriasis have been developed, but because they cannot be delivered via the skin, they are injected using needles and syringes, which limits their acceptance and can have negative systemic side effects. A team of researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has circumvented these limitations by using an ionic liquid (IL) combination to successfully deliver a small interfering RNA (siRNA)-based treatment directly to the skin in a mouse model of psoriasis, significantly reducing levels of inflammatory cytokines and symptoms of...

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