CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., May 3, 2022 — AMPEL BioSolutions today announces a breakthrough in precision and personalized medicine that could revolutionize the way doctors treat inflammatory skin diseases, such as Lupus, Psoriasis, Atopic Dermatitis and Scleroderma. Revealed in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, the paper details AMPEL’s breakthrough machine learning approach to characterize disease activity from gene expression data obtained from patient skin biopsies. The lab test, only a concept for the last few years, is now ready for development for practical use. AMPEL's initial focus was Lupus, but the test can be used for many autoimmune or inflammatory skin diseases that affect more than 35 million Americans.
AMPEL's innovative machine learning approach, which is now ready to be developed as a decision support biomarker test, could greatly impact health care by allowing physicians to identify the cause of patient disease symptoms and select appropriate treatment more precisely. AMPEL’s approach is sufficiently sensitive to detect changes in clinically uninvolved skin so that early intervention may prevent systemic flares and skin damage apparent in lesions. The application of AMPEL’s machine learning approach could also assist pharmaceutical companies in drug development and clinical trials.
Patients with chronic skin diseases often suffer from unpredictable disease activity that impacts daily activities like work and family life. Since unpredictable symptoms often result in trips to the Emergency Room, the ability to predict worsening disease and systemic involvement with routine skin biopsies has important health care and health economics implications.