Future Directions in Dermatology: Breakthroughs from Maui Derm 2025

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Raj Chovatiya will share his insights on the Maui Derm 2025 conference. Dr. Chovatiya is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Rosalind Franklin University Chicago Medical School and Founder and Director of the Center for Medical Dermatology and Immunology Research in Chicago. Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Chovatiya:

I’m excited about so much when it comes to thinking about dermatology in the next few years. It’s hard to pick just a few, but let me touch on a couple of disease states.

In the case of atopic dermatitis, even though we have a lot of approved medications, there’s a lot of newer agents that are in the pipeline in phase I, phase II, and even phase III; some of which have showed some success, and some of which haven’t looked so great. And I think what’s going to be really exciting is I want to know what’s going to hit, what’s going to miss, and how is this going to teach us about the biology of the disease. In particular, we’re starting to ask a lot of questions about disease modification or disease remission. Can we actually change the course of disease, or can we actually remit disease? And some of the agents that are helping us to answer this are ones that are looking at various types of immune checkpoints, also ones that are looking at co-stimulation as well, and so I think that these therapies, whether they go all the way or not, are going to teach us something really important about how this disease works.

In the case of psoriasis, we’re seeing a couple of really interesting moves towards optimizing therapy to meet what patients want. Patients time and time again always talk about how they really want to have great effective oral options, and in previous years, we had middling levels of efficacy with some of some of our older options, but in the last few years, we’ve started to see more of a concerted effort to try to see how our orals can be as good as our systemic therapeutic biologics. And so we’re starting to see some move in that area for mechanisms that we know about but innovative ways to go after them to get higher levels of efficacy. Additionally, optimization of biologic therapy. We’re starting to see now ways in which we can maybe optimize our dosing so patients may not have to use that much therapy to really get the highest level of responses.

In HS, I’ll say quite simply there is a lot going on because we don’t know that much about the pathogenesis of this disease no matter how much we studied it, so there are so many different immune targets that are being investigated, and it’s going to be really cool to see—again, much like atopic dermatitis—what’s going to hit and what’s going to miss. And more importantly, for the more intriguing options that have shown favorable phase II data that are moving on to phase III, can we move beyond the dreaded high score 50 and start aiming for 75, 90, and even 100 percent improvement in the course of our clinical trials? It’s really going to be a great few years.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Raj Chovatiya sharing his insights on the Maui Derm 2025 conference. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!