A patient with a life-threatening skin disease has been successfully treated following research that combined the use of mice, artificial intelligence (AI) and cell and tissue cultures.

Toxic epidermal necrolysis – or TEN – is a rare disease usually triggered by medication that can be as mild as aspirin, but which leads to an extreme immune response by immune cells in the eyes, skin and throat, resulting in large areas of the skin blistering and peeling.

The exposed areas are painful and easily prone to infection, with a third of patients dying and many others enduring long-term injuries.

An international team, which included EARA members the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, used a technique called spatial proteomics, that studies how proteins are organised within cells, to analyse seven patients with TEN – one of whom was deemed likely to die.

Using a laser-scalpel the team extracted individual cells from the patients and the immune cells were separated from skin cells using AI. The analyses then showed that the diseased cells produced high levels of interferons (proteins that kill viruses).

The team therefore looked to a treatment using proteins called JAK inhibitors that reduce the effect of interferons.

This was then tested in a mouse model of TEN, at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Australia, where it stopped the animals’ wounds from worsening, and also successfully treated all seven patients.