Question-and-Answer Session
Unidentified Audience Member
(Question inaudible)
Douglas Abel
So, we are talking about atopic dermatitis, I believe, or eczema. It's believed to be an underlying autoimmune condition. But you often see in children, what you begin with is dry, itchy patches of skin or plaques as they are know. They are not typically as thick and scaly as a psoriasis plaque would be, where you get that raised induration and that hyper-proliferation response, but more of a red. It can be dry and a little flaky patch, significant itch. Now, from there, as the disease worsens you have people who do get psoriaform or psoriasis like plaques, but that’s usually end-stage of the disease, when they have had it for a long time. But as I said, manifested red, flaky, scaly, dry-skin-looking, with usually a significant itchy component. There are some underlying autoimmune conditions going on, because you do see rapped immune response in the skin of these pediatric children.
Unidentified Audience Member
But if you do nothing, does it eventually go, or what?
Douglas Abel
The question is if you do nothing in atopic dermatitis does it eventually go away? About 60% of the individuals who suffer in childhood carry some symptoms into adult life. Now they're often not as severe as what they had as a child, and it’s easier to work with an adult. Though if you scratch, you get a excoriation, which leads to worsening of the disease's condition, so it’s a lot easier to manage in the adult population, than in a child who really doesn’t understand what's going on around him, and he is dealing with this, and the parent dealing with this. And for people with this disease, the skin can become so irritable that even taking a bath can be a problem for some of these children. And atopic dermatitis is part of this so called triad of atopic dermatitis, asthma and allergy, and you often see children with some manifestation of all three. But the bigger market opportunity for us is in that pediatric population, of 12 and under, five and under, being a very dramatic segment, but there are some adults who do suffer.
Unidentified Audience Member
What's the reason why these diseases attack children, rather than adults?
Douglas Abel
The question is the underlying rational or reasoning for why atopic dermatitis is more prevalent in children than adults. And I don't have a good answer for that, if I did, maybe I could solve the disease and we'd have a whole new business opportunity downstream. But it really is a problem in children. We often see asthma and allergy being more predominant in the child. It becomes more manageable as they age, be old, kind of grow out of some of those conditions. But we are seeing a number of people carrying this condition forward in time.
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