Meet Stephanie van Dalen, a scientist at Citryll, and an integral part of our Translational Medicine team, specializing in hidradenitis suppurativa (HS). In her role, she serves as a link between innovative research and clinical practice, collaborating with HS clinicians and external partners to collect essential patient data.
Today, we’re excited to feature her in our second Employee Spotlight. In this Q&A, Stephanie will share some of her journey, what motivates her and the main challenges still faced in autoimmune disease treatment.
1. What inspired you to become a scientist, and what drew you to autoimmune disease in particular?
I have always been intrigued by the human body – its complexity, how ingeniously organs and cells all work together, and how well the body can cope with disruptions of its steady state. This is, for instance, very clear when you look at hormonal cycles and the immune system. The body seems to have a solution for everything, and if not, we become ill. By understanding what goes wrong in the human body when someone gets sick, we can design therapies and try to improve the outcome. That is my drive: to give the body a push in the right direction to recover from disturbances.
2. What does a typical day at Citryll look like, and what keeps you motivated?
I am part of the Translational Medicine team with my focus being on HS. In my role, I contribute to bridging the gap between research and the clinic. My days typically revolve around collaborating with HS clinicians worldwide to obtain patient samples to study the likelihood of this disease being a good target for our drug; designing projects with external parties to measure what is going on in patient material; collaborating with the clinical team to see how we can get even more valuable data out of our clinical trials; and working in our lab on models to explain what our drug does in patients. I find the versatility of my work very attractive as I can learn a lot from all the different disciplines I collaborate with.
3. You recently authored a paper on Hidradenitis Suppurativa – could you give some more detail on this and the role of ETs?
Yes that’s right, we shared our findings in the International Journal of Dermatology. Our research has shown that neutrophil ETs are abundantly present in HS skin, not only in the lesions but also in the surrounding, seemingly unaffected skin. In addition, we measured increased markers for neutrophil ETs in the blood of moderate to severe HS patients. This means that our target is elevated with increasing disease severity, and this supports our idea that our drug can have a beneficial effect in HS. It provides important validation as we move forward to a phase 2a clinical trial, which will start later this year.
4. It’s autoimmune disease awareness month – what challenges remain for treating these diseases?
For most autoimmune and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, we still do not fully understand what exactly goes wrong in the human body. Specifically for HS, this is a multifactorial disease in which, for instance, lifestyle factors such as smoking and obesity, genetic predisposition, the skin microbiome, and hormonal status, increase the risk of derailing the immune system and developing lesions. This complexity makes it very difficult to cure such diseases, and current treatment options often focus on the management of flares rather than addressing the root of the disease.
5. How do you see the field of autoimmune disease research evolving in the next five years?
I expect that the increasing accessibility of multi-omics, i.e. broad screens for multiple factors in one go, will speed up the elucidation of disease triggers, the discovery of biomarkers, and the development of new therapeutic approaches. I hope to, together with my colleagues at Citryll, contribute to this progress by providing further evidence that targeting ETs can help reshape the treatment landscape in HS. In that case, our drug CIT-013 can potentially improve outcomes for patients across a wide variety of autoimmune and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.