Dr Jonathan Silverberg Previews the Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis Meeting

There are a number of topics attendees can be excited to learn about this year, says Jonathan Silverber, MD, PhD, MPH, professor of dermatology, director of clinical research and patch testing at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and chair of the Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis (RAD) conference.

Transcript

What topics are you the most excited about that will be presented at this year's 2023 Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis Conference?

There are a number of topics that I'm really excited about. I think probably the ones that I'm most excited about are the ones that are really directly clinically relevant now for all of us in the clinical trenches.

We have a symposium devoted to how to manage cases of atopic dermatitis in infancy—often those are more challenging scenarios that can come up in terms of both safety, efficacy, and special sites like the face; and what do we do about food allergies. So, something that really we can incorporate into our clinical practice now.

We're going to have some updates on some of our newer therapies like the JAK inhibitors and other classes of newer medications that we're using now, but we need to understand more about the safety and the efficacy. And so, there's been an extraordinary amount of recent data. We'll have some update sessions to address that.

We'll also learn about some of the newer indications and newer ways we can use our various therapies that are in our toolbox. And then we're going to have some sessions around how to deal with how to best assess patients in clinical practice in a way that's not going to slow us down, but really can make us better at best identifying patients who need different types of therapies. Maybe the funnest sessions of all will be the atopic dermatitis games, where we're going to have some really fun ways of learning and dealing with case-based sessions and thinking about different ways of addressing challenging cases, recognizing there is no one size fits all approach, and what we can do in different tough scenarios. So those are just a few of the different sessions that I'm really looking forward to.

What do you hope attendees will take away from this year’s conference?

One of the most important things to take away from the conference is to recognize that atopic dermatitis is not the same disease now as it was when you were training 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. We have learned so much; not only how to better diagnose it, how to better recognize different subsets of patients, how to classify the disease, but what an amazingly rich toolbox of options we have with so much more coming. And to really get up to date with data, learn more about the disease, take your understanding of the disease into the 21st century and elevate the quality of care you're providing for patients.