August is Psoriasis Awareness Month — a chance to reflect on one of the most common, yet most complex, inflammatory skin diseases.
Introduction
The following article is drafted for Psoriasis Awareness Month and explores the challenges of studying, diagnosing and treating psoriasis. It explains why traditional models often fall short, and highlights TenSkin™ as a human-relevant, ex vivo solution for studying the ‘bad actors’ in psoriasis of inflammation, barrier dysfunction, and drug delivery in real human skin.
Psoriasis is a chronic, immune-mediated skin disorder affecting over 100 million people worldwide. It is characterized by accelerated keratinocyte turnover, inflammation, and disruption of the skin barrier. Key signaling pathways — particularly IL-23/Th17 and TNF-α — drive the development of red, scaly plaques, though the exact mechanisms can vary between individuals and even between lesions in the same patient. Despite decades of research and numerous treatments becoming available, psoriasis remains highly variable in how it presents — and how it responds to therapy.
This variability poses a major challenge for drug development
To understand how psoriasis treatments work — or why they fail — researchers require models that accurately reflect the complexity of human skin and its immune responses. Yet most preclinical studies still rely on cell-based assays or animal models, particularly mice, which differ significantly from humans in skin structure, immune signaling, and barrier composition. Rodents, for example, lack key layers of the epidermis and have a thinner dermis with different immune cell populations.
While they have contributed to key mechanistic insights, rodent models often fail to reliably predict clinical efficacy or side effects in humans. This translational gap contributes to high attrition rates, particularly in dermatology drug development, and can delay or even prevent promising therapies from reaching patients.
In parallel, animal research faces growing ethical and regulatory pressures. The FDA’s Modernization Act and the 3Rs framework — to Replace, Reduce, and Refine the use of animals in science — are increasingly recognized and adopted across academia and industry. As a result, there is increasing demand for human-relevant, ethically sourced alternatives that can provide more predictive data while minimizing reliance on animal studies.
Enter TenSkin™ — Ten Bio’s advanced ex vivo human skin platform.
TenSkin™ is derived from ethically donated surgical skin, processed and cultured at physiological tension to retain the innate complex architecture and key functional responses of living human skin. Unlike reconstructed skin or traditional explants, TenSkin™ preserves key physiological features: including native dermal-epidermal structure, physiological mechanical tension, dermal fiber orientation, and resident immune cell function— all critical for studying chronic inflammatory skin diseases.
This physiological fidelity makes TenSkin™ a powerful platform for psoriasis research, enabling scientists to:
- Recapitulate psoriasis-associated inflammation through cytokine stimulation, modeling Th17-driven immune responses in ex vivo human skin to evaluate both disease mechanisms and anti-inflammatory interventions
- Investigate barrier dysfunction, including reduced expression of important structural proteins such as filaggrin, loricrin, and claudin-1, which are frequently disrupted in psoriatic skin
- Quantify pro-inflammatory cytokine responses to immune stimuli, compounds, or microbial triggers
- Evaluate drug penetration, retention and bioactivity of topically applied or systemically relevant agents in a native human skin environment
- Model wound-induced inflammation, providing insight into barrier disruption and local inflammatory cascades relevant to psoriasis
- Profile tissue- and cell-level responses to novel therapeutic candidates, including biologics, immune modulators, and barrier-restoring agents.
TenSkin™ offers a translational bridge — enabling researchers to investigate human-specific disease biology and therapeutic response in a highly reproducibility, ethically sourced, preclinical model. By applying defined cytokine cocktails, TenSkin™ can be used to simulate psoriasis-like inflammation, offering a tunable model for investigating Th17-driven disease mechanisms and therapeutic effects in a controlled, human-specific system.
From discovery to translation: The value of human-relevant models
Each sample of donated human skin, when incorporated into the TenSkin™ platform, serves as a biologically meaningful model that reflects the complexity and natural variability of human skin — providing researchers with a controlled, yet physiologically relevant system for experimental investigation. By enabling studies in intact human tissue, TenSkin™ allows researchers to identify promising therapeutic candidates earlier, refine formulation strategies, and characterize mechanisms of action in a context that closely mirrors patients’ biology.
This level of translational insight can reduce the risk of very expensive failure in later-stage trials, particularly in a condition like psoriasis where immune responses and treatment efficacy vary so widely between individuals. TenSkin™ offers a way to study these differences in a controlled lab setting — supporting not only drug development but also a more personalized understanding of disease mechanisms.
At Ten Bio, we are committed to advancing psoriasis research with models that prioritize human relevance, ethical tissue uses, and scientific precision.
This Psoriasis Awareness Month, we are proud to support the innovators, researchers and developers, working to deliver more targeted, effective solutions — with better models, from the very beginning of their efforts.
Ten Bio Team August 2025
