Aarhus University Hospital

Aarhus University Hospital (AUH) belongs to the elite of university hospitals with the aim to be the best choice for patients and professionals. For eleven years in a row Aarhus University Hospital has been appointed Denmark's best hospital.

AUH develops and provides highly specialized treatment, research and education at an eminent international level. AUH has an annual budget of more than 800 million Euros and is currently undergoing new construction to become the second largest hospital in Scandinavia with a campus exceeding 400.000 m2 in size. AUH has 1150 beds and about 10.000 employees and has a major focus on research and innovation, as evidenced by the close interaction with Department og Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University and related biotech and biomedical industry partners. Within recent years, AUH has been successfully involved in more than 26 collaborative EU projects including IMI-projects.

The Department of Dermatology at Aarhus University Hospital is an internationally renowned and highly specialized department for diagnosis and state-of-the-art treatment of the entire spectrum of skin diseases. The department is particularly known for its recently established National Centre for Autoimmune Diseases. This centre is a collaborative effort where dermatologists, gastroenterologists and rheumatologists together with a psychologist, a dietician and a social worker diagnose, treat and handle patients with complex autoimmune diseases including psoriasis, ulcerative colitis and Crohns disease. The idea of this centre, which is financially supported by the Danish Ministry of Health, is to take a holistic approach to patients with complex autoimmune diseases.

Role within ImmUniverse

AUH participates in work packages 1, 2 and 5 as pat of his project.

Work package 1: AUH will participate in starting up the project, administration of the budget and the on-going evaluation of results obtained in the project. Work package 2: As a clinical dermatological partner which also includes the Danish national Centre for Autoimmune Diseases, AUH will actively participate in establishing SOPs and implementing these for sample handling, extraction, transport and quality control of tissue samples from the different patient groups involved in this project. Work package 6: AUH will ensure ethical approval for subsequent tissue sampling from patients with atopic dermatitis. That also includes collection and registration of all patient characteristics. These two WPs aim to collect prospective tissue samples from patients undergoing different treatments. As a dermatological department with a long lasting experience in conducting clinical trials (phase I-IV) and with a huge patient flow, AUH is an ideal partner for this part of the project. The Department of Dermatology has its own separate clinical trial unit with experienced study coordinators (3 nurses) and two trained dermatologists.