Insights From Spring AAD 2024: Atopic Dermatitis in Adults

In this feature video, Dr Jonathan Silverberg went over what his session, “Atopic Dermatitis in Adults”, covered prior to Spring AAD 2024.

Jonathan Silverberg, MD, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor of dermatology and director of the patch testing clinic at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, DC. He is also the director of clinical research and contact dermatitis. His area of expertise is in inflammatory skin disease, focused on atopic dermatitis and contact dermatitis.

Transcript:

Can you go over what your session on adult atopic dermatitis will cover?
Dr Silverberg: So, my session on adult atopic dermatitis is going to cover a whirlwind of data on atopic dermatitis in adults. We're going to do a little bit of a master class addressing clinical pearls around the assessment and management of atopic dermatitis. We're going to touch upon a lot of the new emerging data for some of the newer therapies, the new topicals, new oral and biologic therapies, which were the right patients for them, when to use them, and how to use them, and also thinking about how to manage a potential risk and adverse events in patients being treated by those therapies.

What are the newest therapies for adult atopic dermatitis that physicians can look forward to or implement their practice when treating patients?
Dr Silverberg: There's a lot of new therapies that are coming now for atopic dermatitis in children and adults. We'll see the first rounds of approvals really happening in adults and/or adolescent. We've got multiple biologics with lebrikizumab coming as an IL-13 blocker and we should see the approval of nemolizumab as an IL-31 receptor blocker. Both of which probably will happen by the end of this year in 2024. We're also looking for, and there's a lot of other biologics that are in development, but further behind. So, we've got a little ways to go to where we'll see those.

We've also got multiple new topical therapies that are expected to be approved within the next probably year or so for atopic dermatitis such as topical tapinarof for moderate to atopic dermatitis and then topical roflumilast for mild to moderate atopic dermatitis. Different mechanisms, different treatment populations in the trials, but I think both will be important additions to our toolbox.

What are the current challenges physicians may face when treating adult patients with atopic dermatitis?
Dr Silverberg: We've been blessed to have a lot of great innovation, and a lot of new therapies, but there still are a number of challenges that we face in clinical practice.

Ranging from where we could always use more efficacy for our therapies to more reliability of our therapies. There's a lot of different patient preferences that will lead us in one direction or another, but sometimes we still have gaps in terms of options that we can use that are well tolerated or safe to use in the oral realm or different modalities and a lot of what we're facing right now is really just learning the ins and outs of these new therapies, understanding where their strengths and weaknesses are. How do you sort of optimize their use? Does that mean tweaking dosing? Does that mean how do we monitor for different treatment, success or for failures and things like that? So, there's a lot there that we still face, that we have to do in clinical practice, but that is the art and the science of dermatology.

What else would you like to share with your colleagues regarding your session at Spring AAD 2024?
Dr Silverberg: For my session at the AAD I think we've got a lot of ground to cover.

What I would say is really keep an eye out. In addition to all of the other data disclosures that are going to be happening at the AAD, because we're expecting really a jam-packed session, with respect to new drugs that are going to be presenting data at the late breaking session. There are data updates with extraordinary amount of posters as well.

So, just a whole lot more data to learn how to digest and figure out how to incorporate into clinical practice.