Psoriasis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Psoriasis, including details on treatment, prevention, medication, causes.

An analysis of select pathogenic messages in lesional and non-lesional psoriatic skin using non-invasive tape harvesting.

Benson NR, Papenfuss J, Wong R, Motaal A, Tran V, Panko J, Krueger GG

DermTech International, La Jolla, California 92037, USA. nbenson@dermtechintl.com

We report the use of non-invasive tape stripping to sample psoriatic lesional and non-lesional skin in 96 patients. The procedure was well tolerated with any discomfort described as mild; we did not observe any cases of Koebner phenomena at any non-lesional tape-stripped sites. Tape-harvested epidermis was extracted for RNA, which was profiled by semiquantitative reverse transcriptase-PCR. This analysis revealed that mRNAs for tumor necrosis factor alpha, IFNgamma, Krt-16, CD2, IL-23A, IL-12B, and vascular endothelial growth factor are overexpressed in the "average" psoriatic lesion in a majority of patients. In addition, 10 of these patients were biopsied at lesional and non-lesional sites and the expression data compared to tape-stripping data. This comparison shows that five of seven mRNA are more highly expressed in cells captured by tape stripping than biopsy, suggesting that the upper aspect of a lesion contains cells very active in the disease. The tape-harvesting data reveal that approximately 46% of lesions have at least one pathogenic mRNA within non-lesional skin limits. Data demonstrate that tape stripping reveals mRNA markers not detected in biopsy samples and thus the method may be a useful supplement to biopsy.

Published 19 September 2006 in J Invest Dermatol, 126(10): 2234-41.
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