Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Peter Lio, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dermatology and Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, will discuss the future of personalized care for atopic dermatitis. Let’s hear from him now.
Dr. Lio:
The notion of personalized or precision medicine and the ability to use biomarkers is something that I think we are all very interested in, and this has been a topic of discussion for at least a decade now and longer in some disease states. But unfortunately, for atopic dermatitis, I think we are not as close as I wish we were.
We have some early stuff. There is actually now a test on the market that's pretty interesting. It can help us distinguish between patients who are likely to respond to a more targeted biologic, the IL-13 pathway, versus needing a JAK inhibitor, the Janus kinase inhibitors. And that is interesting. To me personally, it's not that useful for my patients at this point in time, but I think it is the beginning of something. It's just probably not a complete sentence. It's sort of the start of something great.
My vision is that we will be able to understand each person's pathophysiology better and understand the underpinnings of their specific presentation, because I honestly believe that there are multiple diseases that we throw together. Some patients I truly think have a primary barrier problem, and we know this, for example, with the whole filaggrin protein and the FLG gene story. These patients seem to have a barrier problem genetically. Then we know some people probably have more of an immune issue primarily. The problem for us is that once one of these factors starts, you get this vicious cycle. If your barrier gets damaged, that activates the immune system, activates the nerve endings, messes up the microbiome, and so on. So everybody can look similar; they can be in this heterogeneous bucket of atopic dermatitis, but it would be so important to understand.
So I think we're getting there. We're on the pathway, but my sense is we're not anywhere really close to an easy clinical test we can do with a swab or ideally just something very non-invasive, like a light scraping or a brushing. That would be transformative. But my hope is in the next five to 10 years, we're going to have the next bits on that pathway.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Peter Lio discussing the future of personalized atopic dermatitis care. To access this and other episodes in this series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
