National Alopecia Areata Foundation Selects Lab for New Treatment Development Program
March 2011
The National Alopecia Areata Foundation (NAAF) is focusing on its
mission of research and launching a new Treatment Development
Program.
With this new program, NAAF is pleased to announce the University of
Colorado Denver, under the direction of George Eisenbarth, MD, has
been selected to conduct the initial experiments on autoantibodies
in alopecia areata.
Dr. Eisenbarth has established a National Institutes
of Health reference laboratory in Denver to identify antibody
specificities in autoimmune disease. David Norris, MD, Chair of the
Dermatology Department at the University of Colorado Medical School,
will provide alopecia areata immunology and biology support to the
study.
The National Alopecia Areata Foundation is very pleased by the
partnership and believes there is much to gain from building on this
laboratory’s knowledge and applying it to alopecia areata.
The University of Colorado Denver laboratory was chosen based on its
prior research advancements in the immunology and autoimmunity of
Type 1 Diabetes. After a NAAF research summit in August of 2009, it
was established that there were shared commonalities between
alopecia areata and other autoimmune diseases such as Type 1
diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
This was later confirmed by the genetics studies
published in Nature in July 2010 by Dr. Angela Christiano of
Columbia University.
The Treatment Development Program is an initiative that evolved from
two research summits in 2008 and 2009. It is a seven year,
two-pronged program with the ultimate goal of finding safe and
effective treatments for alopecia areata.
One approach will be to partner with corporations and the National Institutes of Health to review effective treatments for other related autoimmune and skin diseases to determine any possibility of efficacy for alopecia areata.
The second approach is
discovering the immune target of alopecia areata through immunology
research in hopes of identifying treatments not currently known or
available. This first segment of the program began in 2010 and has a
goal of concluding in 2016.
The National Alopecia Areata Foundation (NAAF), headquartered in San
Rafael, CA, supports research to find a cure or acceptable treatment
for alopecia areata, supports those with the disease, and educates
the public about alopecia areata. NAAF is governed by a volunteer
Board of Directors and has a prestigious Scientific Advisory
Council. Founded in 1981, NAAF is widely regarded as the largest,
most influential, and most respected foundation associated with
alopecia areata.
To learn more about alopecia areata, or to schedule an interview
with a NAAF researcher, please contact the National Alopecia Areata
Foundation office at (415) 472-3780 in San Rafael, CA or visit the
NAAF website at www.naaf.org.
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