The idea – how did the company come to be founded?

Dr. Giménez, who was born in Columbia and has Spanish citizenship, has good reasons for becoming a researcher and entrepreneur in Germany. Having studied biology, he specialised in immunology and then focused completely on his chosen subject – the skin. He completed his doctorate on chronic-allergic skin infections while working under Prof. Marcus Maurer, Director of the Institute of Allergology at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. By this time, he had decided to found a company of his own. He chose Tübingen as his new home and the base for his start-up, but not just for personal reasons (his partner lives here). After all, he was looking for an excellent scientific location that would help advance his research. In BioRegio STERN Management GmbH, he found the support he needed to start his small company and get it successfully off the ground, for example with targeted funding from the EU’s BioMan4R2 and Codex4SMEs projects. Although the company was registered in the commercial register in Aurich, Lower Saxony, at the request of Dr. Ernst Johann Krüger, the CFO, who is based there, IntegraSkin’s research and development takes place in the STERN BioRegion.

The need – who benefits from the idea?

Many people suffer from skin conditions at some point in their life. Some of the people affected – estimated to be around three-quarters of a billion – develop severe cases of chronic inflammatory skin conditions (CISCs). They often suffer the symptoms for years – in a significant number of cases, their whole lives. The reddened, itchy, inflamed patches of skin are not just irritating and painful, they also have a massive impact on the everyday and social lives of many patients. However, these skin conditions are often simply considered to be “superficial”, and only the symptoms are treated, so as to make them bearable. The patient cannot be completely healed, though, until the precise causes of the symptoms are understood. Treatment follows the principle of trial and error, because the same symptoms can have very different causes, such as environmental influences, food intolerances and genetic predispositions. The medicines do not have a targeted effect – cortisone or immunosuppressants only “cover up” the symptoms rather than curing them. In some cases, the medications even cause additional problems for the patients, such as TWS (topical steroid withdrawal, cortisone withdrawal syndrome) and red skin syndrome (caused by improper application of topical corticosteroids). The first treatments using biologicals – biotechnologically engineered medicines that interfere with the inflammatory process in a targeted way, were developed around 20 years ago. These improved matters for some groups of patients, but there is still no cure for many of those affected, and the treatments are still very expensive.

The USP – what is the innovation?

With his company IntegraSkin, Dr. Giménez is planning nothing less than a revolution in dermatological diagnostics. As a pioneer in molecular analysis for chronic skin conditions, he develops and combines the latest technologies for this purpose. Initially, the researcher and his team fundamentally focused on understanding what the differences are between inflamed and healthy skin. After all, the causes, molecular links and processes that lead to the illness are not yet completely understood for many immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMID). What is clear, however, is that these conditions manifest at the molecular level. IntegraSkin uses a small skin and blood sample to investigate the pathogens – the mechanisms that trigger the CISC – of each individual patient. The company has developed a special method of tissue sampling and preparation for this so it can extract thousands of disease-relevant parameters from mRNAs, proteins and immune cells. Instead of conducting superficial analyses of the patients, Dr. Giménez gets under their skin to identify molecular changes. To interpret these changes, the company uses “omic” technologies such as genomics, epigenomics and proteomics to analyse the processes. IntegraSkin is the only company in Europe to use both proteomics and transcriptomics for the comprehensive analysis of proteins and RNA in skin lesions.