A hair shaft that reports hidradenitis activity, and what patients will actually accept from AI

The edition in brief

A quiet day for dermatology trials, and a strong one for mechanism. An FDA supplemental application for abrocitinib (Cibinqo) appeared on 2 September; the database entry is administrative and does not state what the supplement covers, so the honest reading is that something has been filed and approved at supplement level, not that a new indication exists. In hidradenitis suppurativa, integrated lipidomics of lesional hair, skin and pus found arachidonic acid and leukotriene B4 dysregulated across all three specimens, with the hair signature correlating directly with disease severity — a sampling method that needs no biopsy — and a proposed cascade running from Gram-negative lipopolysaccharide through keratinocyte cPLA2-alpha to neutrophil 5-lipoxygenase, LTB4 and neutrophil extracellular traps. In systemic sclerosis, the NNMT inhibitor II559 suppressed TGF-beta-driven myofibroblast differentiation in patient fibroblasts and reduced dermal thickening and collagen in bleomycin-treated mice while sparing dermal white adipose tissue. In psoriasis-relevant work, BET inhibition blocked TNF/IL-17-induced recruitment of BRD2/3/4 to the IL-6 and IL-8 promoters in primary human keratinocytes, with BRD4 and p65 enriched preferentially at IL-6. All three are laboratory findings with no patient data and no trial, and should be read as targets rather than treatments. The one study in people is a survey of 10,013 US veterans who had received dermatology care, of whom 1,881 answered in full: mean willingness to use technology for skin care was 3.6 on a five-point scale, highest for a primary care physician guided by a computer (3.8) and lowest for computer-guided self-care (3.5). Younger age and health literacy predicted willingness; avoiding travel mattered least.