Spotlighting Pediatric Dermatology Updates for 2026, With Dawn Eichenfield, MD, PhD

The 2026 Maui Derm Hawaii conference included a session titled ‘Pediatric Dermatology 2026,’ during which a panel of pediatric dermatologists touched on the latest data in pediatric dermatology, including new drugs and therapies for pediatric patients.1

In a new interview filmed on-site at Maui Derm, the HCPLive editorial team spoke with Dawn Eichenfield, MD, PhD, a dermatologist at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego and assistant clinical professor of dermatology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Eichenfield spoke with HCPLive about some of the most notable takeaways from her talk, as well as related questions in the pediatric dermatology space.

The following Q&A interview is a transcript of her questions and answers:

HCPLive: What are the most meaningful changes in pediatric dermatology practice that clinicians should be aware of heading into 2026?

Eichenfield: I think that what is really exciting about pediatric dermatology is the number of treatments and therapeutics that we now have available for our kids. There was a time where we barely had any biologics for psoriasis, and now we have many. Then, in atopic dermatitis, we have, of course, dupilumab, which has been around the longest. But we now have others that are trickling down into the pediatric space.

In my talk today, I actually talked about tips and tricks for biologics. One of the ones that I spoke about was about dupilumab and about how it's really important to know the mechanism of your biologic. This is just because sometimes, if you know the mechanism, you can often use that medication off-label to treat other cytokine diseases that are mediated by that same kind of pathway.

Then there are other things, trying to figure out how to take care of different side effects that might happen from the biologic, and also, when does disease modification occur in atopic dermatitis? We're always interested in curing the disease. If we are able to get a better result, are we able to stop the medicine, and when should we try to do it, and how to do it? Those are all things that I highlighted today in my talk.

HCPLive: Are there specific conditions in pediatric patients where emerging data or therapies are changing how you approach diagnosis or management?

Eichenfield: I think there are quite a number so genetic skin diseases. In today's day and age, with more high throughput sequencing and gene panels, I think we approach genetic skin disease very differently. We do a lot more kind of genetic testing and sequencing, for example, in epidermolysis bullosa, [which is] a big skin disease that we as dermatologists see. It used to be that there would be a day where we would take a biopsy and do electron microscopy and different things like that, trying to induce a blister.

Nowadays, the test is more based on the genetics. So, you can go ahead and just swab the kid or draw blood and send that to 1 of the commercial companies and get a diagnosis that way. They can actually find the molecular etiology. It’s the same for ichthyosis. With ichthyosis, they've actually changed the nomenclature. So we used to have ichthyosis vulgaris. Now we call it epidermal differentiation disorder with flagrant EDD dash flags. So there's lots of changes in pediatric dermatology genetic disease, where we're kind of focusing a lot more on the gene and less on the clinical presentation.

HCPLive: What pearls from your session can help general dermatologists feel more confident treating children in busy clinical settings?

Eichenfield: I did talk quite a bit about how to give injections to kids in my talk. I think it's really hard, because kids are really scared of shots, but a lot of our treatments are still shot-based. There are different ways that you can ice the skin, chilling for anesthesia. There are creams that you can use. There's a little device, a vibrating device that looks like a little bee or a little ladybug, to help distract the skin. There are also different ways that you can time your injection, like sometimes if you do it a little slower, some kids might feel that less painful. So there are small little tips and tricks, but we do hope one day that we can have a painless injection.

The quotes contained here were edited for clarity.

Eichenfield had no relevant disclosures of note for this interview.

References

1. Eichenfield D, Fallon Friedlander S, Treat J, et al. Pediatric Dermatology 2026. Presented at the 2026 Maui Derm Hawaii Conference, January 25-29.