031 Tape strips better capture epidermal barrier abnormalities of patients with atopic dermatitis compared to skin biopsies

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Our knowledge of atopic dermatitis/AD is largely derived from whole skin biopsies, which may cause scarring and infection. Tape strips are a minimally invasive technique to collect skin samples. A study directly differentiating the two approaches is unavailable. We thus compared the transcriptomic profile of lesional AD skin as captured by tape strips and skin biopsies taken from 20 moderate-to-severe AD patients and 20 healthy controls. We performed RNA-sequencing, using criteria of fold-change/FCH ≥2.0 and false discovery rate/FDR ≤0.05 to identify differentially expressed genes/DEGs.