Dr Peter Lio: Setting a New Standard for Biologics Use in Atopic Dermatitis

Peter A. Lio, MD, clinical assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, highlights the key points of his 2023 Fall Clinical Dermatology Conference session, "Closing the Healthcare Gaps in the Management of Moderate to Severe Atopic Dermatitis With Biologics."

According to Lio, the goals of dermatologists are to break down complexities, offer insights on effective use of new medicines, and enhance patient selection to minimize adverse effects, with a commitment to making advanced care accessible to all.

Transcript

What are some major health care gaps in the management of moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, and how can biologics help address them?

There have been so many new discoveries. With that, of course, comes new treatments, and with those new treatments, we have a new set of things we have to talk about with patients and families, and make sure we understand it well enough to answer questions and deal with some of the issues that will inevitably arise.

Part of what we're looking for is trying to set a new standard. We want people to be aware that the goalposts have moved a little bit, or what we like to talk about this treat-to-target. Even 10 years ago, I think we were happy to just get patients better to show them we could make some improvements. Now I think we're really going for getting people clear or almost clear all the time. To do that is a bit harder, but we finally have some tools in our toolbox to do it. What we're seeing are some questions that come up, some maybe hesitation and fear around some of the newer treatments, which, admittedly, are coming out at a fire hose sort-of level. It's so many things that are happening at once.

Our goal is to break things down, talk about how we can take good care of everybody, maybe not just the patients who are lucky enough to be able to go see a super specialized person who's on the cutting edge of this. I mean, those patients are lucky, if you live near a big university or clinical trial center or somebody who really is interested in the condition, but many patients don't, and we have to make sure everybody can feel comfortable doing this. This is an area we certainly do not want to stratify. We want everybody to be able to get the best care. So, trying to think about some of the barriers to care, and there are many. Even for the best funded university center, there are tons of barriers, and as you go farther from that, I think there's more and more barriers, some of which are educational.

We're really hoping to meet some of those needs, to really get down to the nitty gritty about how to use these new medicines, what do we have to look out for, what are the pitfalls, and how can we pick the patients appropriately, because patient selection is such an important part that we want everybody to do as well as they can. We really want to try to avoid side effects at all costs, so we're really working on this, and I think this session is going to do a deep dive into the state of the art.