Zurich, Switzerland – July 9, 2026. Cytosurge AG, a company specializing in same-cell biology, announced today that a study conducted with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has been published open-access in the peer-reviewed journal JCI Insight.
The research maps out how a protein called dermokine governs skin cell adhesion, pointing toward new treatment targets for chronic ulcers and epithelial skin cancers, both conditions tied to breakdowns in how skin cells stick together.
The Editing Challenge
Human keratinocytes, the cells that make up most of the skin’s outer layer, are notoriously difficult to genetically modify. Their fragility and low tolerance for standard lab handling have long limited how deeply researchers could probe their biology.
The study, titled “Multi-omics analysis reveals dermokine as a regulator of keratinocyte differentiation and adhesion,” describes how the research team used Cytosurge’s CellEDIT service to get around that limitation.
The DTU team worked with Cytosurge to produce isoform-specific dermokine knockouts in human keratinocytes, allowing them to isolate the protein’s individual contributions to skin biology.
What Made The Difference?
Standard bulk CRISPR delivery methods put significant stress on fragile cell types, often skewing results toward whichever cells happen to survive the process rather than reflecting the broader population.
CellEDIT’s approach avoided that problem, enabling multi-guide CRISPR editing with precise dosing and minimal cell stress. That preserved genuine biological replicates and kept the cells’ natural characteristics intact, rather than selecting for stress-resistant outliers.
The researchers then cross-checked their lab findings against tissue samples from patients with chronic, non-healing wounds and found that the cellular mechanisms they identified in culture matched what was happening in real patient tissue.
Researcher Perspectives
Vahap Canbay, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral scientist at DTU, said CellEDIT allowed the team to generate multiple independent clones, which strengthened their ability to cross-validate findings and dig deeper into the underlying biology.
He said this level of access let the team map cellular processes that had previously been out of reach, including the specific mechanisms linking dermokine to cell-cell adhesion and their relevance to skin health and disease.
Tobias Beyer, Cytosurge’s Chief Scientific Officer and a co-author on the paper, said keratinocytes present a particular challenge for conventional CRISPR approaches because of their sensitivity and poor transfection rates.
He said the workflow gave researchers the deterministic control needed to work around that barrier, and called the study further confirmation that CellEDIT can handle difficult-to-edit models, including 3D organotypic skin cultures.
Adèle Kerjouan, who manages the CellEDIT product line at Cytosurge, said the technology moves cell engineering away from probabilistic trial-and-error toward deterministic control, which she said gives researchers a way to pursue edits once considered impractical while maintaining strong biological integrity in their results.
About The Technical University Of Denmark
DTU was established in 1829 and has grown into an internationally recognized technical university, built around the idea that education and research should create tangible societal value.
Its work spans a wide range of technical and natural science disciplines, with active programs in fields such as sustainable energy and life sciences.
About Cytosurge
Cytosurge develops same-cell biology tools built on its patented FluidFM technology, which allows researchers to read from, write to, and analyze a single living cell repeatedly over time rather than relying on one-time destructive measurements.
Its FluidFM OMNIUM platform powers CellEDIT, a system designed for deterministic, vector-free CRISPR engineering. The approach avoids the toxicity associated with bulk editing methods, giving researchers a path to engineer cell lines previously considered too difficult to modify while keeping the resulting phenotypes biologically accurate.