Alexander Navarini

The Navarini Lab connects two worlds of data. Disease-driving genetic variants are uncovered and followed up functionally — with a focus on neutrophil-mediated and autoinflammatory skin diseases. The exome-wide sequencing that once carried this work is now complemented, and increasingly superseded, by spatial transcriptomics (NanoString), which locates disease-driving programmes at single-cell resolution directly within affected skin tissue. Work on generalised pustular psoriasis and the IL-36 axis (including IL36RN and AP1S3 variants) has shaped today’s disease classification and contributed to targeted therapies such as spesolimab.

In parallel, the team develops machine-learning methods for dermatology: self-supervised learning, data-quality and bias audits, anomaly detection and foundation models — alongside work on global fairness and diversity, for example using image data from Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the code is released openly as Digital Dermatology (DBE University of Basel & HSLU).

At the Department of Biomedicine the group runs a keratinocyte organoid platform and an AI group for quantitative skin analysis. The aim is a robust genotype–phenotype correlation as a basis for future clinical decision support.

The full research group — AI, biomedicine and clinic — is presented at navarinilab.com. The lab is open to partnerships and accepts referrals for the genodermatosis clinic.