A Look Back at RAD 2025 Before This Year’s Encore in Music City

One year ago, dermatology clinicians, allergists, pediatricians, and advanced practice providers headed to Nashville for the annual Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis (RAD) Conference, a unique meeting devoted entirely to atopic dermatitis (AD). Now in its seventh year, RAD has become a fixture on the dermatology conference calendar, and this week’s 2026 edition has arrived with sessions running June 17 through 19. Before this year’s speakers take the stage, let’s revisit last year’s program and how its expert insights are still shaping how clinicians counsel patients today.

Co-chaired by Jonathan Silverberg, MD, PhD, MPH, and Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, MSCI, RAD 2025 packed its 2-day agenda with sessions on JAK inhibitors, biologic sequencing, pediatric management, and the psychosocial toll of the disease, organized loosely around 3 practical aims: evaluating the efficacy, safety, and mechanisms of available and pipeline treatments; applying patient-centered approaches that account for comorbidities and preference; and translating guideline-directed care into daily practice.

A Broader Biologic Bench

Several of the meeting’s most cited data sets addressed a problem that has quietly dogged AD research for years: who actually gets studied. Eli Lilly presented final 24-week results from the phase 3b ADmirable study, the first phase 3 trial of any AD biologic conducted specifically in patients with skin of color. Among the 90 adult and adolescent participants with Fitzpatrick phototypes IV through VI, 78% achieved EASI 75 and 54% reached an IGA score of 0 or 1 with at least a two-point improvement at week 24, while 60% reported clinically meaningful itch relief and 73% saw improved quality-of-life scores.

Sanofi and Regeneron brought a parallel story for dupilumab. Late-breaking data from the phase 4 DISCOVER trial showed that dupilumab monotherapy produced significant improvements in EASI-75 and itch scores among adult and adolescent patients with skin of color, alongside a 65% reduction in postinflammatory hyperpigmentation severity. The safety profile, 41.9% of patients reported a treatment-emergent adverse event, none of them serious, was consistent with the drug’s long-established record.

Looking Upstream of the Cytokines

If one mechanism dominated hallway conversation, it was OX40/OX40L. In a session with Johann Gudjonsson, MD, PhD, Christopher Bunick, associate professor of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and editor in chief of Dermatology Times, walked attendees through the rationale for targeting the co-stimulatory interaction between OX40 on activated T cells and OX40L on antigen-presenting cells — a step that sits upstream of the interleukin signaling that today’s monotargeted biologics block. He reviewed interim data for 2 agents in development, rocatinlimab and amlitelimab, both of which had shown reductions in EASI scores and meaningful rates of IGA 0/1 and EASI 75 response with favorable early safety signals, while cautioning attendees that full phase 3 results for the OX40L-targeting compound were still pending.

Reframing, Not Retreating From, JAK Safety

JAK inhibitors got a candid airing. Leon H. Kircik, MD, used his session to walk through the origin of the class-wide boxed warning, tracing it back to a tofacitinib trial in rheumatoid arthritis patients who were over age 50 and had at least one cardiovascular risk factor. He also discussed a label update permitting more flexible dosing of abrocitinib, noting that while the drug’s short half-life means symptoms can return quickly after a missed dose, that same property lets responders down-titrate with confidence once their disease is controlled. Chovatiya, who presented alongside Tejesh Patel, MD, and G. Scott Drew, DO, made a related case for individualizing maintenance regimens. Clinicians can move many patients on tralokinumab, lebrikizumab, or nemolizumab to every-4-week or every-8-week, label-supported dosing once they’re doing well.

Matthew Zirwas, MD, used his RAD 2025 interview with Dermatology Times to look further down the road, predicting that an eventual generic version of tofacitinib could meaningfully expand access to off-label dermatologic treatment, and flagging povorcitinib, an investigational JAK1 inhibitor, as a likely advance for hidradenitis suppurativa (HS). He described the drug’s effect on HS, by his own admittedly anecdotal experience, as “the most effective thing I’ve ever seen.” The forecast held up: by the fall of 2025, Incyte had released 24-week phase 3 STOP-HS data supporting that early read, with regulatory submissions to follow.

Reframing Itch

Pruritus, long treated as a downstream symptom rather than a target in its own right, got a dedicated mechanistic deep dive from Gil Yosipovitch, MD. His session walked through immune-targeting options (IL-4, IL-13, and IL-31 blockade), neural-targeting agents borrowed from neuropathic pain management, and the emerging role of opioid receptor modulators that correct the mu-opioid and kappa-opioid imbalance implicated in chronic itch.

Zirwas added a head-to-head framing in a separate “Medical Crossfire” session on IL-31 versus IL-13 inhibition, arguing that nemolizumab’s direct targeting of the itch-associated cytokine IL-31 may give it an edge for pruritus specifically, even as IL-13–directed therapies remain the broader anti-inflammatory workhorses.

Safety Myths in Pediatric Care and Beyond

Pediatric sessions tackled both pipeline data and persistent misconceptions. Arcutis Biotherapeutics presented long-term safety and efficacy data for roflumilast cream in young children—a preview of the evidence base that would help support the drug’s FDA approval for children as young as 2, granted later that year. Furthermore, Peter Lio, MD, used his session to argue that the field is heading toward genuinely personalized regimens for children, while candidly acknowledging that precision medicine in AD remains more aspiration than reality today.

Two of the meeting’s most discussed sessions took aim at common misconceptions. Lisa Swanson, MD, and Anne Marie Singh, MD, paired a pediatric dermatologist’s and an allergist’s perspectives in a session correcting a persistent myth: true food-triggered AD affects only an estimated 2% of patients, with food allergy and eczema more often coexisting independently than one driving the other. Brad Glick, DO, MPH, tackled a different misconception in his session on topical steroid withdrawal syndrome, detailing the clinical signs that distinguish it from a severe AD flare and the collaborative history-taking needed to make the diagnosis correctly—a session that Mississippi dermatologist Maureen Offiah, MD, later singled out to Dermatology Times as one of the meeting’s most immediately useful for everyday practice.

Treating the Patient Behind the EASI Score

Several sessions argued that severity scores tell an incomplete story. Mona Shahriari, MD, devoted her talk to what she termed the cumulative life course impairment of AD: the slow accumulation of sleep loss, anxiety, depression, and strained relationships that objective measures like EASI or IGA can miss entirely. Tiffany Mayo, MD, extended a similar whole-patient lens to a comorbidity clinicians often overlook, presenting complex cases linking AD and alopecia areata through shared inflammatory pathways and reminding attendees that the severity of hair loss, like the burden of AD itself, is measured less by visible disease than by its impact on the patient.

What’s Already Changed Since Last June

Measured against the calendar, RAD 2025 looks less like a snapshot than a leading indicator. Roflumilast cream 0.05% has since been approved for children as young as 2, with phase 3 data showing roughly 40% of pediatric patients reaching EASI 75 at four weeks compared with 20% on vehicle, and itch improvement within 24 hours of the first application. Ruxolitinib cream received its own pediatric label expansion down to age 2 that September. Povorcitinib’s HS program advanced from interim talk to phase 3 readout within months.

None of this guarantees what will headline RAD 2026, but it suggests the questions clinicians were debating in Nashville last June—about dosing flexibility, about who gets represented in trials, about how to talk with patients about the parts of this disease a skin exam cannot capture—were the right ones to be asking.

The meeting returns to Music City for an expanded 3-day run, beginning today! Will you be attending? Dermatology Times will be live on-site again with coverage of the sessions, the data, and the conversations clinicians have in between. Follow us on social media and subscribe to our eNewsletters to stay connected with the latest insights!