Professor Luke O'Neill

Now I'm lucky, it's very mild.

It's on my elbows, knees, it comes and goes, you know.

But some people have very severe psoriasis.

That's the severe end of it, I guess.

But it's very common as a condition, so I'm very happy to cover it.

I've been following this as a research area since the mid-80s, remarkably.

It's a classic immune disease.

In this case, the skin gets affected, of course, and my main specialty is immune diseases.

especially what I call autoimmune diseases, where your own immune system attacks your own body.

Auto means self, and your own self gets attacked by the immune system.

And psoriasis is an autoimmune disease.

And we can start off by saying we don't know what causes it.

We know it's in the skin.

The key feature, as anybody would be familiar with this disease, but now you get red scaly patches on your skin.

And in severe cases, they can cover 80, 90% of your body.

So it's a very serious disease down that end of the spectrum.

What's happening is the cells in your skin are dividing too much.

Now in your skin, you've got things called keratinocytes.

That's the cell type in your skin.

And they're the ones that make the skin actually.