Grand Challenges in Dermatologic Drug Discovery: Four Priorities to Transform Skin Disease Treatment

The document identifies four key priorities to transform skin disease treatment: targeting pathogenic tissue-resident populations, integrating regenerative strategies with immunomodulation, achieving durable cancer prevention, and ensuring complete wound healing. Despite advancements with therapies like biologics and JAK inhibitors, many treatments lack lasting efficacy. The document stresses the need for predictive biomarkers, improved drug discovery models, and expanded druggable targets to achieve sustained drug-free remission. It also highlights the importance of integrating multi-omic data, enhancing delivery systems, and developing regenerative approaches. Standardized outcomes, biomarker platforms, and patient engagement are crucial, alongside diversity and equity in research. The cutaneous microbiome is an emerging area of interest, with microbiome-targeted interventions showing promise. Public-private partnerships and real-world learning systems are essential for accelerating translation and embedding biomarker sampling into routine care.