1. ¹DermTech International, La Jolla, California, USA
2. ²University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Dermatology, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Correspondence: Dr Nicholas R. Benson, DermTech International, 11099 N. Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, California 92037, USA. E-mail nbenson@dermtechintl.com

Received 13 January 2006; Revised 20 April 2006; Accepted 21 April 2006; Published online 1 June 2006.

Abstract

We report the use of non-invasive tape stripping to sample psoriatic lesional and non-lesional skin in 96 patients. The procedure was well tolerated with any discomfort described as mild; we did not observe any cases of Koebner phenomena at any non-lesional tape-stripped sites. Tape-harvested epidermis was extracted for RNA, which was profiled by semiquantitative reverse transcriptase-PCR. This analysis revealed that mRNAs for tumor necrosis factor , IFN, Krt-16, CD2, IL-23A, IL-12B, and vascular endothelial growth factor are overexpressed in the "average" psoriatic lesion in a majority of patients. In addition, 10 of these patients were biopsied at lesional and non-lesional sites and the expression data compared to tape-stripping data. This comparison shows that five of seven mRNA are more highly expressed in cells captured by tape stripping than biopsy, suggesting that the upper aspect of a lesion contains cells very active in the disease. The tape-harvesting data reveal that approximately 46% of lesions have at least one pathogenic mRNA within non-lesional skin limits. Data demonstrate that tape stripping reveals mRNA markers not detected in biopsy samples and thus the method may be a useful supplement to biopsy.