Quarterly Newsletter – October 2024 - Issue No.24

Professor Chris Griffiths
GPA Director

Director’s Foreword

It’s been a busy few months since I last wrote to you, mainly because late summer and early autumn (for our Northern hemisphere readers) is conference season. The Manchester GPA team is now firing on all cylinders again with the arrival of the most recent member of our research team Dr Alexandre Cobre who hails from Mozambique but joins us from a research post in Brazil. We have just published the results from our 2022 Greenland field survey in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, may I extend a big thank you to Morten Bahrt Haulrig for leading on the paper during his PhD studies. We are now working on a psoriasis focused paper using the same database. The SKINSCAPE study from 2023 is in the final stages of write-up and all being well will have been submitted for publication by the time you read this Newsletter. We produce infographics for the majority of our papers and, as you will see from the one on generalised pustular psoriasis in Malaysia in this issue, they are designed to portray the key factoids from the research in an easily accessible manner. This is vitally important as we seek to disseminate our work as widely as possible.

In September, the GPA team attended the annual congress of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) in Amsterdam. Amongst the canals and Rembrandts, the team had positive and progressive field survey planning meetings with colleagues from Indonesia and India in addition to updates in one-to-one meetings with many friends of the GPA. Of importance, our formal Steering Committee and Funders meetings were extremely positive as was the Board of Governors meeting. We also attended the ILDS Grand Challenges in Global Skin Health joint atlases meeting under the chairmanship of ILDS President Henry Lim. There is considerable synergy between the four atlases and exciting times ahead. Alison Wright presented two GPA posters at the EADV, findings from our most recent field study SKINSCAPE and Ahmad Aalemi's work on the psychosocial difficulties of people with psoriasis living in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The next occasion where the GPA team will be out in force and where we will have several presentations and an exhibition stand is the 10th Congress of Psoriasis: from Gene to Clinic in London at the beginning of December. Hopefully, I will catch up with some of you there.

With my best wishes,
Chris Griffiths

Professor Darren Ashcroft
GPA Research Director

I was delighted to meet up with so many of our international colleagues at the EADV Congress in Amsterdam in September. Our GPA team presented updates on our research achievements, alongside holding many meetings to explore and plan for our future research. Since my last update, I am very happy to report on another of our recent publications “Development and evaluation of an online training tool to aid in the diagnosis of chronic plaque psoriasis”: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jvc2.525

This study involved developing an online training tool to improve diagnosis of psoriasis by general practitioners (GPs), nurses, and pharmacists. We evaluated the performance of the newly developed training tool by conducting a before-and-after exploratory investigation. The tool contained written recommendations for the diagnosis of psoriasis in different skin colours and a medical artist's illustrations of psoriasis to overcome the lack of representative images of the disease in skin of colour and to illustrate the salient features more clearly than clinical photographs. Our findings showed that the training tool helped to improve the accurate diagnosis of psoriasis, which could lead to more timely diagnosis and treatment of psoriasis and support relevant and faster referral to specialist dermatology clinics. Our next study testing the tool will take place in the Netherlands in 2025.

Later in November, we will be welcoming Dr Bryan Guevara from the Southern Philippines Medical Centre who will be spending time with the GPA who are hosting his International Psoriasis Council (IPC) Fellowship. Bryan has recently used our GPA survey to examine the lived experience of psoriasis for people in the Philippines.

Finally, we will be presenting an update of our global systematic review examining the epidemiology of psoriasis at the Psoriasis: from Gene to Clinic 10th Annual Congress in London in December and look forward to meeting up with our regional and national GPA collaborators at this event.

Dr Alexandre de Fátima Cobre joined the GPA research team as a Research Associate in August.

Dr Cobre is working with Dr Aalemi, GPA Research Fellow and Dr Dimmock, GPA Research Associate on new studies examining the epidemiology of psoriasis, analysing prevalence, incidence and mortality.

We are excited to welcome Alex to the team.

From left to right: Professor Peter Van De Kerkhof (IPC), Professor Henry Lim (ILDS), Arpita Bhose (ILDS), Professor Darren Ashcroft (GPA), Christy Langan (IPC), Kathleen Gallant (IFPA), Frida Dunger (IFPA), Professor Chris Griffiths (GPA), Dr Sicily Mburu (IFPA), Ingvar Ingvarsson (IFPA), Dr Alison Wright (GPA)

The Grand Challenges in Global Skin Health Team from left to right: Professor Darren Ashcroft (Research Director GPA), Professor Chris Griffiths (Director GPA), Professor Henry Lim (President ILDS), Professor Khaled Ezzedine (Director GLOVA), Professor Carsten Flohr (Director GADA), Professor Gregor Jemec (President GHiSA)

In September Dr Ahmad Aalemi, Dr Alexandre Cobre and Alice Silk attended the University of Manchester’s Internationalisation Bicentennial Global Health Conference.

They heard from several interesting and informative speakers celebrating a few of the University’s many global partnerships.

The GPA is grateful for the ongoing support from the University of Manchester and the opportunities that these global partnerships present for research teams at the University.

From the 5th–7th December 2024 the GPA will be attending the Psoriasis: From Gene to Clinic congress at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London.

Psoriasis: from Gene to Clinic is the premier global meeting addressing the long-term skin condition psoriasis which in 2014 was recognised by the World Health Organization as ‘a serious noncommunicable disease’.

GPA Director Professor Chris Griffiths will be co-hosting this 10th International Congress, and the GPA will have a stand in the exhibition space of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre during the congress so please visit us and say hello to GPA Programme Manager Thomas Rogers and GPA Administrator Alice Silk.

To learn more and register for the congress visit https://psoriasisg2c.com