In November 2025, we saw key leaders in the field of dermatology gathering at the New York Academy of Medicine for the 6th Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit: The Translational Revolution (New York, NY, USA).
Alternating between New York and Vienna, the Summit has become a key forum for exploring how discoveries in basic immunology are being translated into meaningful clinical therapies.
Founded by internationally recognised experts including Dr James Krueger and Professor Emma Guttman-Yassky, alongside Professor Georg Stingl, the meeting brings together world leaders working across immune-activated skin conditions such as psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, alopecia areata (AA), vitiligo and hidradenitis suppurativa (HS).
To capture key perspectives from the 2025 Summit, we spoke with editorial board member, Professor Dedee Murrell (Sydney, Australia), to bring you some of the key messages from a selection of standout presentations delivered during the three-day event.
Several notable developments in AA were presented at this year’s meeting, with a recurring theme centred on the overlap between AA and atopic disease. This was explored in depth during the session Atopic dermatitis & alopecia areata: Common mechanisms and targets, delivered by Professor Emma Guttman-Yassky (New York, NY, USA), who highlighted shared immunological pathways and potential therapeutic implications.1
Some of the key evidence discussed included the high prevalence of atopic features in patients with AA. Professor Guttman-Yassky reported that between 40% and 60% of individuals with AA have an atopic diathesis, with approximately half having a history of atopic dermatitis. The emerging genetic data linking AA with increased interleukin-13 (IL-13) signalling was also explored, along with growing evidence drawing increasing attention to distinct seasonal patterns in disease flares, with peaks observed between January and March, and again between September and November, suggesting that viral or seasonal infections may act as triggering factors in genetically susceptible individuals.
Building on these clinical and immunological links between alopecia areata and atopic disease, the session explored growing interest in potential shared pathogenic pathways, with particular focus on the role of type 2 inflammation in AA, and ultimately the therapeutic implications.
Janus kinase (JAK) inhibition featured prominently in this context, given its ability to indirectly modulate cytokine signalling pathways implicated in type 2 inflammation. Clinical trial data from several JAK inhibitors investigated in AA, including baricitinib, deucravacitinib and ritlecitinib, were reviewed. However, a key message was that progress has been uneven, with a number of JAK inhibitor studies failing to demonstrate meaningful clinical benefit in AA.
Other novel strategies were also discussed, including etrasimod, a sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) receptor modulator that has previously been studied in atopic dermatitis and is now being evaluated in clinical trials for AA.2
OX40 inhibition also emerged as a therapeutic target for AA, not only in this session but across the wider Summit, including in Hair loss and systemic inflammation, presented by Dr Natasha Mesinkovska (Irvine, CA, USA), and in an oral abstract presentation reporting encouraging phase 1b/2a results for the anti-OX40 monoclonal antibody IMG-007 in severe AA.3,4
Collectively, the key message from these presentations was that the encouraging results observed with OX40-targeted therapies in atopic dermatitis may also translate into therapeutic benefit for patients with AA.
Also during the session on Hair loss and systemic inflammation, Dr Mesinkovska discussed the importance of disease duration as a key predictor of therapeutic outcomes in AA.3
The data presented demonstrated that the length of the current AA episode is a critical determinant of treatment success, with significantly poorer outcomes observed in patients with active disease lasting more than four years. These findings underscore the potential value of earlier intervention and highlight the importance of timely diagnosis and treatment in optimising clinical outcomes for patients with AA.
Beyond discussions of pathogenesis and therapeutic developments in AA, a standout session focused on patient testimony from individuals enrolled in an ongoing dupilumab in AA trial. In this session, six participants (three adults and three adolescents) shared their experiences, offering a powerful and deeply human perspective on the impact of the disease and its treatment.
Among the adolescent patients, the profound psychosocial burden of alopecia areata was especially evident. The teenagers described the impact of visible hair loss during early adolescence, a period around 10-14 years of age when we know peer responses can be particularly harsh.
One boy described wearing a beanie continuously, even after experiencing hair regrowth with dupilumab, explaining that he no longer felt confident removing it in public. Another, whose scalp, hair and eyebrows had regrown, appeared more confident and engaged, while a third patient with partial regrowth described continued distress, as patchy hair loss remained difficult to conceal.
The adult patients echoed similar themes. One man, whose hair had regrown, described how distressing it had been to hear others minimise his experience by suggesting that hair loss “doesn’t matter” for men. He explained that AA differs significantly from male pattern baldness, as it involves complete hair loss rather than a shaved or thinning appearance. Another adult patient, described wearing a wig consistently and explained that this was the first time she had appeared in public without it. Despite clinical improvement, she reported still lacking the confidence to remove her wig at work, fearing questions and assumptions about serious illness, including cancer.
These testimonies emphasized a key message that needs to be relayed and understood by health authorities, that although AA is often regarded as a cosmetic condition, its psychological and social impact can be profound, and similar to that experienced with other visible skin conditions, such as vitiligo.
Results from the ongoing 112-week, phase 2 trial led by Professor Guttman-Yassay at Mount Sinai investigating the efficacy of dupilumab in children aged 6–17 years with alopecia were also discussed at the meeting.1
Two key messages emerged from discussions around this open-label study. First, meaningful hair regrowth can take time. The study noted that some patients receiving dupilumab required treatment for a year or longer before improvement became apparent, particularly those with long-standing disease.
Second, discussions focused on the potential long-term role of dupilumab as a treatment option. If proven successful, dupilumab could offer adolescents a well-established and potentially safer alternative to systemic corticosteroids.
In the field of aesthetic dermatology, Dr Helen He (New York, NY, USA) examined the molecular pathways linking skin ageing and inflammatory skin diseases in her oral presentation, The intersection between skin aging and inflammatory skin diseases, highlighting how a better understanding of these molecular drivers could enable the development of more targeted interventions to promote skin longevity.
A central theme of the presentation was “inflammaging”, the concept that chronic, low-grade inflammation ages your skin. Dr He described how senescent skin cells actively drive inflammation through the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, releasing pro-inflammatory cytokines that perpetuate tissue damage. Metabolic factors were also discussed, particularly the role of excess insulin signalling as a contributor to chronic inflammation, collagen degradation and cumulative structural damage in the skin.
In addition, aged skin was shown to exhibit both increased inflammation and barrier dysfunction, both features that are also characteristic of inflammatory skin diseases. Using RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) analysis of skin biopsies across different age groups, her team have demonstrated that while patients with atopic dermatitis display persistently elevated inflammatory signalling at all ages, inflammatory activity in healthy skin rises progressively with age. In older individuals, inflammatory marker expression approached levels typically observed in atopic dermatitis. This age-related inflammatory shift was also accompanied by RT-PCR evidence of barrier dysfunction, challenging the perception that impaired skin barrier function is confined to childhood disease.
Interestingly, individuals aged over 60 years in the study showed significant upregulation of immune cytokines across the TH1, TH2, TH17 and TH22 pathways, highlighting a potential opportunity for intervention using existing or emerging therapies that target these inflammatory axes.
Dr James Krueger delivered an update on HS, highlighting a condition that clearly remains profoundly burdensome for patients and continues to present a major unmet clinical need, reflecting what he described as an incomplete understanding of HS pathogenesis and the resulting lack of effective and sufficiently targeted treatments.5
Against this backdrop, the talk explored the numerous investigational therapies currently under evaluation, and in particular recent results around the selective JAK 1 inhibitor, povorcitinib.
Krueger presented data from the phase 3 STOP-HS1 (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05620823) and STOP-HS2 (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05620836) trials, which evaluated povorcitinib in adults with moderate to severe HS.6,7 In these studies, patients were randomized to receive high- or low-dose povorcitinib or placebo.
By week 24, approximately 60% of patients had achieved or maintained the primary endpoint of Hidradenitis Suppurativa Clinical Response (HiSCR50), while around 20% achieved complete response. At the higher dose, approximately 50% of patients experienced complete resolution of draining tunnels, alongside fewer disease flares.
From a safety perspective, no major adverse events were reported across placebo or treatment arms at six months. One provoked venous thromboembolism event was observed, while serious infections were predominantly skin-related. Opportunistic infections were mainly herpes zoster, consistent with the known safety profile of JAK inhibition.
Despite these encouraging results and potential progress in improving available therapeutic options, and given the high prevalence of comorbidities in HS, particularly diabetes (which affects up to 25% of patients), the talk highlighted that careful patient selection will certainly remain essential if considering JAK inhibitors. While JAK1 inhibition may offer meaningful clinical benefit for some patients, comorbidity burden and cardiovascular risk will need to be carefully weighed in clinical decision-making.
In a recent endowed lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Dedee Murrell herself challenged the long-standing dogma surrounding clinical trials in blistering diseases, particularly the concurrent use of high-dose corticosteroids.8
The prevailing approach in bullous pemphigoid has long been rapid initiation of high-dose steroids to suppress blistering quickly. Although interest in immunomodulatory agents such as azathioprine, mycophenolate mofetil and methotrexate has grown over time, clinical trials have failed to show meaningful added benefit over placebo. Professor Murrell suggested this was largely because any therapeutic effect was masked by the concurrent use of very high-dose systemic corticosteroids, which not only dominated treatment response but also introduced rebound phenomena when not tapered extremely slowly.
Within this context, the first successful clinical trial in this space evaluating dupilumab marked an important shift. Professor Murrell explored the significance of this development in her session, Is dupilumab a game-changer for bullous pemphigoid?, at this year’s Summit.9
A key difference in this dupilumab study was the use of substantially lower doses of systemic corticosteroids at treatment initiation, limited to 0.5 mg/kg/day. In Professor Murrell’s view this approach allowed the therapeutic effect of dupilumab to be more clearly observed, without being obscured by the impact of high-dose steroids.
In considering whether dupilumab could be a game changer in the management of bullous pemphigoid, Professor Murrell suggested that it may well be, primarily because of its safety profile. Patients with bullous pemphigoid are typically very elderly, often over 80 years of age and frequently have multiple comorbidities, making them poor candidates for prolonged courses of high-dose systemic steroids. Dupilumab, by contrast, has been approved for atopic dermatitis in children as young as 6 months.10
In addition, its mode of administration may make it a more practical therapeutic option. In France, for example, the standard approach has been the extensive application of potent topical steroids, effectively from the neck down, including to areas without blistering, twice daily. In many healthcare settings this model is neither realistic nor affordable. By contrast, dupilumab is administered as a subcutaneous injection once every 2 weeks, making it a far more practical option.
In terms of efficacy, there is also a growing body of evidence supporting its use. Multiple large prospective and retrospective studies have now been published, and a recent meta-analysis pooling data from three major studies showed that dupilumab performed better than standard care across nearly every outcome measure, albeit in non-randomized settings.11,12,13,14,15,16,17
Returning to the long-standing view that all patients with blistering disease must receive high-dose systemic steroids, Professor Murrell’s session prompted broader questions about whether safer therapies should instead be considered from the outset. For example, in rheumatology, clinicians have moved towards early steroid-sparing strategies, successfully conducting trials with lower doses and alternative therapies. Dermatology, particularly in blistering diseases, may be lagging behind because of this persistent belief that high-dose steroids are essential.
If these highlights have sparked your interest, information on the 2026 Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit, including the full scientific programme, is now available on the official meeting website: https://www.isds2026.org/. Held on Wednesday, 15 July 2026 at The New York Academy of Medicine, New York City, the 2026 Summit will explore GLP-1 effects on the skin, inflammation, skin ageing and cardiometabolic syndrome.
With GLP-1 agonists reshaping care in diabetes, obesity, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), cardiometabolic syndrome and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and emerging evidence suggesting a role in chronic inflammatory immune-mediated diseases, the meeting promises to offer a timely and much-needed forum on the intersection between systemic inflammation, metabolic dysfunction and skin disease.
References
- Guttman-Yassky E. Atopic dermatitis & alopecia areata: Common mechanisms and targets. Presented at 6th Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit, The New York Academy of Medicine, NY, USA, 14 November 2025.
- Efficacy and safety of etrasimod in alopecia areata: A multicentre, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, Phase 2 study. J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol. 2025;39(6):1174-1184.
- Mesinkovska N. Hair loss and systemic inflammation. Presented at 6th Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit, The New York Academy of Medicine, NY, USA, 14 November 2025.
- Guttman-Yassky E, Senna M, Sajic D, et al. 260 Anti-OX40 monoclonal antibody IMG-007 exhibited clinical activity of hair regrowth, suppressed scalp inflammatory biomarkers in patients with severe alopecia areata in a Ph1b/2a study. J Invest Dermatol. 2025;145(Suppl.):E72.
- Krueger JG. Hidradenitis suppurativa. Presented at 6th Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit, The New York Academy of Medicine, NY, USA, 14 November 2025.
- ClinicalTrials.gov. A Study to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of Povorcitinib (INCB054707) in Participants With Moderate to Severe Hidradenitis Suppurativa (STOP-HS1). ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05620823. Available at: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05620823 (accessed 19 March 2026).
- ClinicalTrials.gov. A Study to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of Povorcitinib (INCB054707) in Participants With Moderate to Severe Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS) (STOP-HS2). ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05620836. Available at: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05620836 (accessed 19 March 2026).
- Murrell D. Fiftieth M.H. Samitz Lectureship in Cutaneous Medicine: Blistering Diseases – a Foray into the Dogma. Presented at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 6 November 2025.
- Murrell D. Is dupilumab a game-changer for bullous pemphigoid? Presented at 6th Inflammatory Skin Disease Summit, The New York Academy of Medicine, NY, USA, 14 November 2025.
- Sanofi. FDA approves Dupixent® (dupilumab) as first biologic medicine for children aged 6 months to 5 years with moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis. [Press release] 2022. Available at: www.sanofi.com/en/media-room/press-releases/2022/2022-06-07-20-45-00-2458243 (accessed 19 March 2026).
- Blauvelt A, de Bruin-Weller M, Gooderham M et al. Long-term management of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis with dupilumab and concomitant topical corticosteroids (LIBERTY AD CHRONOS): a 1-year, randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial. Lancet. 2017;389(10086):2287-2303
- Simpson EL, Paller AS, Siegfried EC et al. Efficacy and Safety of Dupilumab in Adolescents With Uncontrolled Moderate to Severe Atopic Dermatitis: A Phase 3 Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Dermatol. 2020;156(1):44-56. doi: 10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3336
- Simpson EL, Bieber T, Guttman-Yassky E et al. Two Phase 3 Trials of Dupilumab versus Placebo in Atopic Dermatitis. N Engl J Med. 2016;375(24):2335-2348
- Paller AS, Simpson EL, Siegfried EC et al. Dupilumab in children aged 6 months to younger than 6 years with uncontrolled atopic dermatitis: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial. Lancet. 2022;400(10356):908-919.
- Ferrucci S, Tavecchio S, Maronese CA et al. Short-, mid- and long-term efficacy of dupilumab in moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis: a real-world multicentre Italian study of 2576 patients. Clin Exp Dermatol. 2024;49(12):1561-1572.
- Faiz S, Giovannelli J, Podevin C et al. Effectiveness and safety of dupilumab for the treatment of atopic dermatitis in a real-life French multicenter adult cohort. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2019 Jul;81(1):143-151. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2019.02.053
- Cather J, Young M, DiRuggiero DC et al. A Review of Phase 3 Trials of Dupilumab for the Treatment of Atopic Dermatitis in Adults, Adolescents, and Children Aged 6 and Up. Dermatol Ther. 2022;12(9):2013–2038
Disclosures: Dedee Murrell has disclosures with Abbvie, Almirall, Amgen, Amicus, Amryt, Anaptysbio, Arcutis, Arena, ArgenX, Aslan, AstraZeneca, BMS, Botanix, Castlecreek, Celgene, Chiesi, Dermavant, Dermira, Evelo biosciences, Galderma, GSK, Incyte, Janssen, Kiniksa, Krystal Biotech, Leo, Lilly, L’Oreal, MedImmune, Merck, Nektar Therapeutics, Novartis, Ono Pharma, Palleon, Pierre Fabre, Pfizer, Principia Bio, Rapt Therapeutics, Regeneron-Sanofi, Rheacell, Roche, Sun Pharma, Takeda, and UCB.
This short article was prepared by touchDERMATOLOGY in collaboration with Prof. Dedee Murrell. Views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Touch Medical Media.
Cite: Highlights from the 6th Inflammatory Disease Summit: 7 key themes. TouchDERMATOLOGY. 27 March, 2026
Editor: Gina Furnival
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