During the 2016 SEPAWA annual meeting, Courage + Khazaka electronic GmbH, the world market leader for skin analysis equipment, have advertised the CK Research Award for Skin Physiology in order to celebrate their 30th jubilee.
The winner of the award endowed with an amount of 3,000 Euro has been announced on October 19th 2017 during this year’s SEPAWA annual conference. The prize was handed over to the team of the Max Planck-CAS Paul Gerson Unna Research Group on Dermatogenomics of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences under the guidance of Prof. Sijia Wang together with the Fudan University and the IUF-Leibnitz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine in Düsseldorf, for their work “A Genome-Wide Association Study of Basal Transepidermal Water Loss Finds that Variants at 9q34.3 Are Associated with Skin Barrier Function”. The study could show that epidermal barrier function assessed by transepidermal water loss is associated with variants on chromosome band 9q34.3.
In his laudatio, Prof. Joachim Fluhr of the scientific committee, explained that the decision was based on the fact that this outstanding work is one of the first genome-wide studies on skin physiology in healthy volunteers.
Courage + Khazaka electronic GmbH from Cologne, Germany, was founded in 1986 and until this day is leading in the development and production of skin measuring equipment that is used worldwide in the R&D laboratories of the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry as well as in dermatological research and teaching, testing institutes and at the point of sale for cosmetic products.
On behalf of the ESA, even at the International Space Station ISS skin analysis devices from Courage + Khazaka have been used in cooperation with the company Kayser-Threde and the testing institute Dermatronnier, in order to assess and document skin changes at weightlessness.
Altogether 40 people work in the family-owned medium-sized enterprise on the development and the production of constantly new analysis methods and devices for skin and hair.
