University of Basel · University Hospital Basel

Skin disease, studied from
three directions at once.

The Navarini Lab pursues three largely independent lines of research — artificial intelligence, skin biology, and clinical dermatology. Each stands on its own and answers to its own field; side by side, they give one group an unusually wide view of skin disease.

Explore the three areas ↓

Artificial Intelligence

Digital Dermatology · Department of Biomedical Engineering

Foundation models and computer vision that learn the visual language of skin — built to generalise across every skin tone and to work alongside clinicians rather than replace them.

Dermatology foundation models

research

Scalable, self-supervised vision models pretrained on large, heterogeneous skin-image collections — a shared backbone for diagnosis, segmentation, and retrieval.

PASSION

open data

An open dataset of pigment-rich paediatric skin disease from Sub-Saharan Africa — 4,901 images from 1,653 patients — closing the diversity gap in dermatology AI. (MICCAI 2024)

Fairness across skin tones

published

Datasets and methods that measure and correct how skin-tone imbalance degrades model performance — so tools work for everyone.

Augmented intelligence for skin cancer

clinical study

Clinician-plus-AI melanoma screening, validated at planet scale — including independent validation in Korea. (NPJ Digital Medicine 2025)

AI skin-aging simulation

research

Generative models that show the future cost of sun exposure — a novel, image-driven route to skin-cancer prevention.

Biomedicine

Immunology & skin biology · Department of Biomedicine

Bench research into the immunology and genetics of inflammatory skin disease — dissecting how the epidermis goes wrong, and growing living skin to study it in a dish.

Human epidermal organoids

lab

3D cultures of healthy and diseased epidermis — a model of Darier disease and other monogenic keratinocyte disorders, built for high-throughput drug screening.

Severe drug reactions

research

Why some medications trigger life-threatening skin reactions (SJS/TEN) — tracing IL-1 family cytokines and CD8⁺ T-cell–driven keratinocyte death.

Rosacea mechanisms

research

The molecular drivers of a chronic inflammatory disease affecting millions — the antimicrobial peptide LL-37 and JAK/STAT signalling.

Clinical

Dermatology & Allergology · University Hospital Basel

Patient-facing research in a university dermatology department — prospective imaging trials, large clinical registries, and the everyday care of complex inflammatory and neoplastic skin disease.

Melanoma & total-body imaging

trial

3D total-body photography (VECTRA) for early melanoma detection in high-risk patients — prospective evaluation of AI-powered whole-body screening.

Pustular psoriasis registry

registry

Deep clinical phenotyping of generalised pustular psoriasis across 500+ patients in Europe and Egypt — flare patterns, comorbidity, and outcomes.

Contact dermatitis & patch testing

clinical

Contributing to the European Baseline Series — tracking emerging allergens across large multicentre patch-test cohorts.

Selected work

A few published projects — the kind of thing that happens when computation, biology and the clinic sit in one group.

The dataset that didn't exist

Dermatology AI had been trained mostly on light skin, so it failed the patients with the least access to a dermatologist. With clinicians in Madagascar, Malawi and Guinea, the lab built PASSION — 4,901 images of pigmented paediatric skin disease — and released it openly.

Does skin-disease AI travel?

An algorithm developed on one population, then tested cold against 152,443 images across 70 diseases from a Korean hospital — a rare, honest measure of whether dermatology AI generalises across the planet.

Growing a genetic disease in a dish

To study Darier disease without a biopsy for every question, the lab grew the epidermis itself — human epidermal organoids from patient cells that reproduce the disease in vitro and open the door to drug screening.

Asking before deploying

Before putting AI in front of patients' moles, the lab ran a prospective study of what patients and dermatologists actually think about augmented-intelligence melanoma screening — because acceptance decides whether good tools ever get used.

Team

One group across three homes at the University of Basel — the engineering department (DBE), the biomedicine department (DBM), and the clinic (USB).

Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Navarini

Principal Investigator · Chair of Dermatology & Allergology, USB

Nina Frey

Laboratory secretary · AI & Biomedicine groups

Digital Dermatology · AI

Philippe Gottfrois

PhD candidate

Fabian Gröger

PhD candidate

Nipun Ranasekara

PhD candidate

Linda Wermelinger

PhD candidate

Collaborators · Hochschule Luzern (HSLU)

Prof. Marc Pouly

Professor of Computer Science, HSLU

Simone Lionetti

Lecturer, HSLU

Ludovic Amruthalingam

Lecturer, HSLU

Skin Biology · Biomedicine

PD Dr. sc. nat. Emmanuel Contassot

Laboratory Lead

Rishika Agarwal

Postdoctoral researcher · epidermal organoids

Erika Parente

PhD candidate · organoids & neutrophils

Jane Olivia Fröhlich

PhD candidate · organoids & immune cells

Tanja Dittmar

Laboratory technician

SAITU · Skin Allergy & Immunology Trial Unit

Ivana Cvijetic

Trial Unit Lead

Prof. Simon Müller

Senior physician (Leitender Arzt)

Hannah Aviv

Resident physician

Karolina Reiprich

Attending physician

Imelda Perez

Senior study-nurse coordinator

Maria Cristina Russo

Study manager

Lorena Maura Merlo

Rotation resident

Piotr Przywora

Rotation resident

+ MD / master students. Study enquiries: studien.dermatologie (at) usb.ch

Contact

Dermatology & Allergology, University Hospital Basel
Burgfelderstrasse 101 · 4055 Basel · Switzerland