Maui Derm 2025: Key Themes and Topics to Know 

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:
Maui Derm 2025 was all about starting the year off right and really trying to guide us for what is coming next, and I think that there’s a few different major themes I can boil this meeting down to that is going to give us something to think about over the coming year. Number 1, first and foremost, we really had a chance to go back to basics and think about what it takes to be a good clinician. We have had so much therapeutic innovation, and we have so many options for diseases that didn’t have options before, but sometimes we forget the fact that sometimes just a little bit of simple history, physical examination, and critical thinking can get us to exactly where we need to even without the need for fancy diagnostics. And whether or not there’s a fancy medication required or not, dermatology at the end of the day usually boils down to some of these basic skills, so it was really nice to see that emphasized throughout the sessions at this meeting.

Speaking of medications, we indeed do have many next-generation targeted topical and systemic medications, more than ever before, so common questions that comes up, especially for disease states that have gotten crowded like psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, are: What am I supposed to do? what do I start with? what do I move to? who’s the right patient for what medication? There probably isn’t a perfect answer for this, but we saw a lot more critical thinking and data to help guide some of those decisions about when, where, and why might be the right medication to use.

We’re getting to know some disease states that we really haven’t had a chance to get familiar with in previous years, so we’ve really thought about some of the definitions and criteria that make somebody have—and I’ll highlight two—chronic spontaneous urticaria as well as chronic hand eczema. These are two diseases that we see all the time in dermatology. Patients are often times itchy, uncomfortable, have a lot of lesional burden, and a lot of quality-of-life issues, but we haven’t had much in the way of targeted therapies in these spaces, and in the case of chronic hand eczema, not much in the way of definitions or even ICD codes for this particular disease as well. So it’s been really nice to see an emphasis from the podium of people becoming to get familiarized with diseases that they otherwise may not have thought about, especially with great medications on the way.

Finally, I would say that another major theme was raising expectations. We’ve gotten used to endpoints and levels of expectation in some particular therapeutic areas, but we really are emphasizing that when it comes to thinking about what’s possible for our patients, we can do better. So in some cases and in disease states like psoriasis where with biologics we can get people 100 percent clear, a lot of the discussion was around “Okay, how can we do this with orals and topicals more so than using biologics only?” In the case of atopic dermatitis, the question was more about “Okay, how can we raise our endpoints and really incorporate what the patients are saying in addition to what we see on exam?” In the case of hidradenitis, it was simply a matter of how can we raise the percentage improvement we should minimally expect from any therapy from being really just all the way at the bottom to something near the top that’s going to make a change for our patients and their life.

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!