Anton Stuetz is Founder and CEO of Pharma R&D Consulting Stuetz GmbH since 2014 and Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Akribes Biomedical GmbH since 2015. He has been Executive Director Dermatology within the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, located in Vienna, Austria, until July 2013.

He is the author/coauthor of 93 publications, 185 abstracts and 42 patents in the fields of synthetic and medicinal chemistry, antifungal chemotherapy, immunology, oncology, inflammation, dermatology and translational research.

Lecture summary: Innovation in drug research is linked with overcoming standard perceptions. I will review key aspects of the discovery and invention of the allylamine antifungals and terbinafine, as well as of the topical calcineurin inhibitors, including pimecrolimus, and the lessons learned during development of these molecules. In addition, I will describe new efforts to improve the therapy of chronic wounds, an area of highly unmet medical need in dermatology.

Jo Lambert is Full Professor in Dermatology and Venerology and Academic Head of the department of Dermatology at Ghent University Hospital in Belgium. Professor Lambert previously studied at the Dermatology Department at Boston University and the Centre for Electron Microscopy at Leiden University.

Professor Lambert is a board member of several national and international psoriasis (and policy) expert committees and is presently the President of the Royal Society of Dermatology and Venereology and member of the Royal Academy of Medicine, Belgium.

Professor Lambert has published more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals and made contributions to several textbooks.

Lecture summary: We live in a highly dynamic era where innovative solutions can be offered to patients with chronic skin diseases. But do we organise ourselves in our practices around these solutions? Do we fully grasp the complexity of the solutions in our daily care? The clinician dermatologist can play a groundbreaking and leading role in how care is delivered and how innovation gets implemented in approaching especially chronic skin diseases. Through a Lean journey, we defined what is valuable for the patient, and how the value stream flows, with optimal removal of wasteful events. In this talk, we will guide you through a road book towards a patient-relevant value-based approach of psoriasis, where we as clinicians took the lead in lowering the cost of care, and improve patient outcomes and satisfaction.

Caroline Robert, M.D., Ph.D. is the Head of the Dermatology Service at Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus, co-director of the Melanoma Research Unit at INSERM 981 and Pr of Dermatology at Paris-Saclay University. She trained at the Paris V University, France and completed a research fellowship at Harvard, Brigham & Women’s hospital in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy. She is past-president the Melanoma group of the EORTC and is board member for EADO, ESMO, EADV, ASCO, AACR. Her main focuses of interest are clinical and translational Research on Melanoma. She is international coordinator of many phase I to III clinical trials and has authored more than 350 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Her recent work has focused on identification of new biomarkers for immunotherapy and targeted therapies of patients with melanoma.

Lecture summary: My talk will highlight the most recent results in the field of Melanoma treatment including new drug combinations and treatments at early stages of the disease, such as adjuvant and neo-adjuvant treatment. We will explore the updates on the management of patients with metastatic stage III and stage IV melanoma, as well as the perspectives in the field of melanoma therapy.