Dr Jason Ezra Hawkes: Exciting Innovations Shown for Precision Medicine, Research, and Technology in Dermatology

Precision medicine is advancing quicker than ever before in dermatology, and this is of utmost importance for certain complex dermatologic conditions that have proven difficult to understand and manage, said Jason Ezra Hawkes, MD, MS, FAAD, board-certified dermatologist and associate professor of Dermatology at the University of California Davis in Sacramento.

Transcript

What are your thoughts on the future of therapeutic innovation in dermatology?

I'm just excited about all of the therapies that are coming into dermatology. I think it's a very exciting time, where precision medicine is really starting to happen. We're talking about personalized therapies for certain types of diseases. And I think the immunology is really catching up to what we have in the clinic. And that's been in part due to huge research advances and technological advances where what we couldn't do 5 years ago, even a couple of years ago, we're starting to do today. So, it's a really exciting time.

We're advancing medicine quicker than we have in the past where research was primarily performed or done in silos. Small groups, studying things in their lab with groups of 8 to 20 people, but now we're in big medicine where large companies and organizations are looking at big data. They're coupling with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

So, I think we can start to tackle some of these really complex medical dermatologic conditions, and really start to tease out subtleties that we couldn't look at or understand what we were looking at with a small microscope, but now we've got the power to start to tease out how do the genetics really play a role with environment, etc. So, I just think this is the beginning of medicines that are going to be really targeted and highly effective, and it's just an exciting time to be in medical dermatology right now.