Video
Dr John Harris: There Are a Lot of Reasons to Talk About Vitiligo at This Year’s AAD Meeting
Author(s):
There is a lot to talk about in the vitiligo space at this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), said John Harris, MD, PhD, FAAD, director of the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School.
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After last year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), the FDA approved the first new treatment for vitiligo, which means this year’s meeting is the first time to talk about it. In addition, there is a lot of research in the space and a lot of opportunity for treatment in the near future, said John Harris, MD, PhD, FAAD, director of the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School.
In addition to speaking in multiple sessions on vitiligo, Harris will be presenting the results of the withdrawal arm of the TRuE-V extension study of ruxolitinib cream in vitiligo. The meeting with take place March 17-21 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Transcript
What are you presenting at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology, and what are you looking forward to at the meeting?
Yeah, I’m excited about the AAD this year, specifically for vitiligo. I'm talking a lot about vitiligo in a number of different sessions, with different angles depending on the session, whether it's the vitiligo symposium itself or a translational research symposium, or a skin-of-color symposium, or a JAK [Janus kinase] inhibitor symposium. There are a lot of reasons to talk about vitiligo.
The reason I'm excited is because we've been treating vitiligo for thousands of years. Interestingly, it started in the Iron Age, and we’ve recognized the disease for a long time, and we haven't seen novel treatments until very recently. So, the past 10 to 15 years, new research has really launched new opportunities, and we saw our first FDA-approved treatment for vitiligo, to treat and repigment the skin, last summer. That was after the last AAD, so we get to announce this new, first FDA-approved treatment.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. So that was a phase 2 and 3 clinical trial that provided the rationale for FDA approval.Wwe're doing more clinical trials now discovering new pathways to target, and so we see a lot of opportunity coming in the near future as well.
