Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, Discusses his Sessions at the Upcoming RAD Conference

Transcript (edited for clarity):

My name is Dr. Raj Chovatiya, and I am an assistant professor of dermatology director for the Center for Eczema and Itch and Medical Director of the Clinical Trials Unit at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. I am also an editorial advisory board member for Dermatology Times.

I'm really happy to give you a little preview of what's coming up with this year's Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis meeting, which is basically a one stop shop for all the crazy fun that we've been having for atopic dermatitis in the past year. But there's a couple of special things that we're really excited about, in part because yours truly is going to be the one delivering them and the first one is going to be one that actually starts up the conference, entitled Key Considerations for Topical Formulations in Atopic Dermatitis, First, Do No Harm. Now, this is gonna be a really fun session, because I'm going over some of what we know about in terms of barrier dysfunction, and immune dysregulation, and atopic dermatitis, prep and stuff that's become a little familiar to us over the past several months. But then I'm going to take a bit of a deeper dive into some of the skin barrier, dysfunction, atopic dermatitis and put it in the context of topical delivery of medication. Now, we know that topical therapies for atopic dermatitis really need to be having adequate uptake and also minimize disruption to the skin barrier. This is easier said than done based on the actual chemistry required to deliver drugs to the skin. And we also know that skin Ph has increased in atopic dermatitis, this disturbs barrier function, this disturbs the microbiome and this is another thing that we have to think about when it comes to how do you design the right kind of way to deliver a therapy. And finally, when it comes to thinking about the right type of treatment, we want something that's going to be moisturized, we want something that's an ammonia, you want something that's humectant properties, that's going to really keep water and moisture inside the skin, something that's not going to actually exacerbate barrier dysfunction further, and so in this session, what we're going to do is actually review some of the basics about how we think about delivering medication across the skin barrier, what we can do to optimize it and take special consideration for the actual pathophysiology of atopic dermatitis in the next generation of topical therapy design. In my second session, I'm going to be having a great chance to talk a little bit about one of the JAK inhibitors that have been very exciting over the past year.

The title of this [next] session is Advancing Therapeutic Expectations: [here we] examined data to constantly support benefit-risk discussion for adult and pediatric patients with refractory moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. And we are going to talk about upadacitinib in depth. So you've had it that there is an oral JAK inhibitor, sort of more JAK 1 selective and 2, 3, and then the JAK family. And importantly, this was a therapy that was approved just about a year ago for patients with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. Now, this has been sort of a real game changer in terms of therapeutic options for our patients, because it's given us a targeted oral route for therapy. It targeted a family of signaling molecules that we really have not been able to target with previous atopic dermatitis therapy. And finally, it's unleashed some of the richest and deepest data as far as improvement both in lesions and itching particular, as it relates to patients with atopic dermatitis. Now, the new information we're really going to get a chance to go over here is a deep dive into safety. So there's been a lot of concern about Jak inhibitors over the past two years when it comes to box warnings, consideration patient selection, and what we're going to do in this session is go across not one, not two, but three years and beyond long term data for patients treated with EU patents that look at what they've disabled look like what adverse events are seen and placed within context with some of those classic white box warnings that exist to really give clinicians the power to have appropriate risk benefit discussions with their patients. I look forward to seeing you all there.