Katrina Abuabara
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Atopic dermatitis, also called eczema, is the most common inflammatory skin condition. It affects up to 20% of children and 10% of adults.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
atopic dermatitis
eczema
dermatology
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Develop machine-learning models that predict persistent atopic dermatitis in late childhood from simple early-life factors, and compare their performance across birth cohorts in Uganda, Ecuador, and the United Kingdom.
- Test whether adding genetic risk scores, environmental variables, and biological samples improves eczema risk prediction compared with models built from standardized, easy-to-measure predictors.
- Extend the prediction models to eczema's related conditions, including asthma, allergies, anxiety, depression, ADHD, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
- Determine how dietary sodium and skin barrier function affect skin sodium levels in adults over 50, using food questionnaires, urine biomarkers, and non-invasive sodium MRI.
- Test whether high skin sodium tracks with atopic dermatitis severity and persistence over two years, and define the immune cell profiles in skin and blood linked to high skin sodium.
- Compare ceramide moisturizing cream with petrolatum ointment in a randomized pilot trial in adults aged 70 or older, measuring inflammatory markers, skin barrier function, and skin microbiome diversity.
- Assess the feasibility of a moisturizer trial in older adults, including recruitment, retention, adherence, and acceptability, to design a future efficacy trial on body-wide inflammation.
More about the research
Some children outgrow it, while others have lifelong disease along with related allergic, mental health, and metabolic conditions. Why it flares and fades, and who will be affected long term, is hard to predict. More broadly, the skin is an immune organ, and a weakened skin barrier may feed inflammation in the rest of the body. The lab's projects use population studies, clinical cohorts, and a pilot trial. They ask who will develop persistent eczema, what drives disease activity, and whether repairing the skin barrier can reduce inflammation throughout the body.
Why it matters
Families of children with eczema could get better information about who is likely to have lasting disease. Clinical trials could also enroll the children most likely to show long-term treatment effects, which matters as new systemic drugs are tested in infants. Identifying salt as a modifiable trigger could lead to eczema care that addresses causes rather than only suppressing the immune system. Moisturizers are cheap, low-risk, and widely available, and they may offer a way to reduce age-related inflammation in older adults.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Debajyoti Ghosh
University of Cincinnati, OH·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether perinatal dysbiosis, an imbalanced microbial community in early life, makes mice more susceptible to skin-associated allergic diseases by weakening the skin barrier.
Emma Guttman
University of Rochester, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify skin gene, protein and microbiome biomarkers that raise the risk of atopic dermatitis or support a healthy skin barrier, comparing high-risk Rochester infants with low-risk Old Order Mennonite infants.
Masanori Matsumoto
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Use a new atopic dermatitis-like mouse model, with S. aureus applied to the skin, to test whether the Agr quorum-sensing system drives skin inflammation by causing keratinocytes to release alarmin danger signals.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.