Emerging Therapies in Pediatric Atopic Dermatitis: Efficacy and Safety

Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Nicole Harter, who’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Dermatology and the Pediatric Dermatology Fellowship Program Director at University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. She’ll be discussing emerging therapies for pediatric atopic dermatitis.

Here’s Dr. Harter now.

Dr. Harter:
I think we have had a lot of novel changes in nonsteroidal topical treatments for atopic dermatitis. This is very exciting because, until the past two years, we’ve really only had one nonsteroidal that we’ve used primarily for atopic dermatitis in our young pediatric patients, and now we have several more, so I think seeing, truly, efficacy of how these are working in the real world in head-to-head clinical trials, how different nonsteroidals compare to each other, and how these new nonsteroidals compare to classic topical steroids will be really key to determine where they fall in our treatment armamentarium.

I think the development of different targeted agents in the biologic field is also huge. We’ve historically, for the past six years or so, in our youngest pediatric population had one primary biologic agent to use for atopic dermatitis, and now we have several more, but seeing how the new research is targeting different pathways and different cytokines within the body that are key drivers for atopic dermatitis, I think we’re going to get more and more narrowed, more focused, more targeted, which means our treatments are safer and they’re more effective. They have less other side effects. And seeing how they evolve to treat some of these other atopic comorbidities—the seasonal allergies, food allergies, and asthma—will also be really interesting to see how they’re implicated in the overall disease state of atopy. 

And then I think as we move into further data on the oral medications, which are small molecule inhibitors which have a different side effect profile and do reduce part of the immune system, we are going to be getting even more targeted, narrow, and focused on those small molecule inhibitors, and that’s exciting because that does reduce the other side effect profile. Because some of these medicines are highly, highly effective, but they do have risks that are sometimes hard for a family to swallow in a young patient. And so it’ll be exciting to see as we get more targeted how much safer and effective we can get, and then the long-term data coming out of that—of really being able to advocate these are safe and effective for long-term use in our pediatric population because we don’t have that cohort of long-term data yet.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Nicole Harter talking about developments in the pediatric atopic dermatitis treatment landscape. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!