It’s just over a year since the new Centre for Applied Excellence for Skin & Allergy Research (CAESAR) was established. As centre lead, this is a chance for me to reflect on what’s been achieved in the first 12 months and what 2025 brings.
CEASAR is part of my NIHR Research Professorship, which is a 5 year award I started in December 2023. Although it is a personal award, what has been really exciting about getting it is all the other people I have been able to start working with because of it.
Over previous years, I’ve worked with lots of dedicated and clever people, who have helped make studies like BEE and TIGER possible. This includes the small army of people at the Bristol Trials Centre, who make clinical trials possible. Clinical trials are usually the best way of finding out whether something is really helpful or not, be that a skin cream, food allergy test or something else.
But not all research needs or is ready for a trial. And how do we know which are the most important research questions to answer anyway?
That’s why I’m so pleased that the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) decided to fund me, CAESAR, and the Transforming Outcomes for Paediatric allergy In primary Care (TOPIC) programme. There are 5 main elements to TOPIC:
- Two are about childhood eczema – finding out the best way to use emollients and topical steroids together and whether an eczema clinic in your GP surgery would help to treat the condition better.
- Another two are about childhood food allergy – deciding what the research priorities are and looking into awareness of current guidance about introducing food allergens into infants’ diets.
- The final one cuts across all of these – keeping the patient and public voice at the heart of what we do and how we do it.
All this is only possible with the work of the 3 Research Fellows, Project Manager and Research Administrator, who do all the heavy lifting to deliver these projects. They are supported by other colleagues who also help supervise 3 PhD students who are doing related work on food allergy and the treatment of eczema. Patient charities have also joined us to help make our research as useful as possible.
With all of the research team in place, CAESAR is now fully-sized, and we have our work cut out in the forthcoming year to seize the opportunities that have come with it. We will continue to write blogs to keep you updated as each bit of research progresses but please get in touch if you would like to get involved or would like to receive our regular newsletter.
Matthew Ridd, January 2025.