Public Funding for Sequential Skin Ltd

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a multifactorial chronic and recurrent inflammatory skin disease, affecting 1-in-5 UK children and 1-in-10 adults. Circa.29% are moderate/severe cases -- affecting over 1.97million patients in the UK alone -- with healthcare and socio-economic costs exceeding £723million annually. With no definitive cure, a significant therapeutic challenge to manage AD flare-ups/progression arises from: * Complexity across varied AD conditions/pathogeneses * Many disparate patient populations * Over 1000 potential therapeutic pathways across different treatments and formulations However, capability of incumbent diagnostic approaches to effectively inform/target these existing treatments is limited. Furthermore, whilst recent research demonstrates that patients' skin microbiome can dictate disease progression, no practical clinical tool for precision skin microbiome analysis exists, preventing patient stratification for emerging personalised AD medicines/treatments. Consequently, treatment pathways (NHS/private) are trial-and-error over multiple visits, failing to adequately: * Relieve symptoms * Minimise side effects * Mitigate disease progression. Sequential Skin Ltd have already introduced a disruptive consumer skin-test for cosmetic skin health applications, based on proprietary: * Analysis of key bacterial microbiome-markers, alongside genetic sequencing * Patches for non-invasive skin sampling, already achieving significantly higher collection efficiency than existing swabs and tape-stripping gold-standards * Laboratory processes reducing time-around for skin molecular results by 75% with respect to other direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies Leveraging breakthrough research demonstrating improved prediction of AD progression using microbial DNA biomarker clusters, Sequential Skin now aim to extend these developments into the clinical domain, targeting the first non-invasive clinical bioinformatic solution for patient-specific AD profiling and treatment prognosis.