Table 1.

Comparison of Investigational Approaches for Personalized Therapy Selection in Inflammatory Skin Disease

	Tape Stripping	Dermal Biomarker Patch (Mindera Health)	Epidermal Curettage (Castle)	RISH Staining	scRNA-seq
Sampling technique	1–20 tape strips applied to the skin	Dermal biomarker patch applied to the skin for 5 minutes	10 scrapes with curette	Skin biopsy	Skin biopsy
Layers of skin samples	Stratum corneum	Epidermis and upper dermis	Not publicly disclosed	Epidermis and dermis	Epidermis and dermis
Cryopreservation necessary	Yes. Must store tape strips at –80 °C	No. Can be stored at 4 °C and processed within 72 hours	Not publicly disclosed	No	Samples typically processed fresh
Likelihood of scar	Low	Not publicly disclosed	Not publicly disclosed	High	High
Integration into clinical workflow1	Can be collected relatively rapidly; requires specific expertise, normalization, and possibly slow turnaround time.	Can be collected relatively rapidly. Turnaround time and cost of commercial service not yet clear.	Can be collected relatively rapidly. Turnaround time and cost of commercial service not yet clear.	Integrates well with IHC workflow in dermatopathology laboratories with rapid turnaround for specific targets.	Resource-intensive sample processing, sequencing, and data analysis.
Throughput/number of markers	Full transcriptome (for RNA-based methods)	Full transcriptome	28 transcripts	One marker per staining; multiple markers can be batched	Full transcriptome
Requires sequencing	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Data analysis	Computational pipelines for microarray or RNA- sequencing data.	Computational pipelines with proprietary algorithms.	Comparison of count threshold values from qPCR.	Manual or automated quantification of positive cells on microscopy slide.	Computational pipelines for scRNA-seq data.
Histologic analysis inherent	No	No	No	Yes	No

Abbreviations: RISH, RNA in situ hybridization; scRNA-seq, single-cell RNA sequencing.

¹Cost will also be an important factor in comparing the feasibility of workflow integration, but there are not enough data at this time to compare costs between methods.