Precision Medicine in Today’s Atopic Dermatitis Landscape, with Peter Lio, MD

Peter Lio, MD, provided an on-site interview with the HCPLive editorial team during the 2025 Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis (RAD) Conference in Nashville, and in this segment he spoke about the prospect of personalized medicine as well as other takeaways from one of his sessions on pediatric atopic dermatitis.

Lio serves as a clinical assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. In this segment of his interview with HCPLive, Lio was asked about his own focus on personalizing plans for caregivers of patients with atopic dermatitis as well as the potential for precision medicine practices in the near future.

“It's so important, this personalized or precision medicine we're heading towards,” Lio expressed. “I think that we're not there yet, and some of the things have been a little disappointing. We were thinking that when the first biologics came out back in 2017 that maybe they would help us subtype. The fancy term for this is a ‘diagnosis ex juvantibus’, where you can make a diagnosis or understand what's happening by what helps.”

Lio commented that some dermatologists had believed that if, for example, blockage of IL-4 and IL-13 took place, this might only treat a certain type of the disease and thus help to separate patients based on who the responders were.

“But it didn't work that way,” Lio said. “So we hadn't had a lot of insight into either the phenotype differences, what they look like, or the endotypes, like biomarkers or molecular markers, yet. But I think we're getting close, because it's starting to converge. There are definitely threads, but we we’re waiting for someone to pull them together into a cohesive story that is clinically actionable…For example, like if a treatment has the potential to cause conjunctivitis or has a chance to cause an allergic reaction or arthritis, maybe I'll be able to say, ‘You shouldn't get this one because you have this particular subtype, you're more likely to develop this problem.’ So that holistic picture of meeting the patient's needs with exactly the right therapy, that's the promise of precision medicine.”

Lio was later asked about some of the other points highlighted in his presentation at RAD regarding the treatment of pediatric atopic dermatitis.
“We talked a little bit about how we can keep the safety aspects of medicines in perspective,” Lio explained. “The analogy I sometimes use for patients who are worried about, let's say, a biologic, but they've been on multiple courses of prednisone or prednisolone. I'll say it's kind of like you've been riding around on a motorcycle without your helmet, and now you're worried about going in this commercial airline. [Of course] tere are risks to everything and I wish I could say there was no risk. But bad things can happen even if you're not on the medicine.”

Lio noted that while some medicines are known to be more risky than others, some of the newer drugs available for patients with atopic dermatitis have a lot more data behind them.

“We know that because a lot of the older medicines never had the kind of studies we have now,” Lio said. “It's a very different standard [than before] because they were there in the 60s or 70s, so we don't know. But the newer drugs have a really rigorous set of data. So again, it’s about trying to compare it and keep it in perspective and trying to balance the corticosteroid phobia.”

For any additional information presented at the RAD Conference in Nashville, view the latest conference coverage. To learn more about Lio’s talk, view the full interview segment above.

The quotes contained in this summary were edited for clarity.