The Tissue-Engineered Human Psoriatic Skin Substitute: A Valuable In Vitro Model to Identify Genes with Altered Expression in Lesional Psoriasis

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease for which no cure has emerged. Its complex etiology requires the development of an in vitro model representative of the pathology. Various skin substitutes were produced by tissue-engineering using biopsies from normal, healthy donors, or from lesional or non-lesional skin samples from patients with psoriasis, and their gene expression profiles were examined by DNA microarray. Total RNA was isolated from five different healthy (18-, 22-, 23-, 38-, and 46-year old) and eight different psoriatic reconstructed skin substitutes (four lesional and four non-lesional (47-, 49-, 64-, and 70-year old))