THE EUROPEAN Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) 2021 Virtual Congress successfully brought together influential clinicians and academics from across the globe, working to achieve the EADV’s aims of “improving the quality of patient care, furthering knowledge and education of dermatologists and venereologists globally through innovation, and advocating on behalf of the speciality and patients.” Rather than viewing the online conference as an obligation, born out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the EADV instead transformed it into an opportunity. This was underscored by Alexander Stratigos, President of the EADV, during the welcome address: “As we move toward a post-pandemic era, our Academy is emerging ever stronger, with a vibrant day-to-day education programme that exploits the unique opportunities presented by digital learning.” Stratigos added: “Through our evolving digital learning ecosystem, we are able to deliver a multitude of online experiences, including webinars, enhanced digital communications, e-learning, and web-based tools to support continuous medical education and allow a broader diffusion of knowledge.”

THE ANNIVERSARY edition of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology’s (EADV) 30th Congress was held between 29th September and 2nd October 2021. As COVID-19 remains a barrier to global travel, the EADV’s 30th Anniversary Congress was staged virtually, providing access to the latest research, breakthroughs, and scientific advances to dermato-venereology professionals.

Melanoma is a prominent type of skin cancer and treatment varies depending on the mutation and malignancy of the disease. The overall survival (OS) rate of metastatic melanoma is 35–50%. Pablo Fernandez-Peñas, Westmead Hospital, Sydney Medical School, Australia, opened the session by stating the discussion was based on BRAF-mutated melanoma. Fernandez-Peñas attested that targeted therapies are not beneficial for BRAF wild-type melanoma.

When I was a medical student at the University of Oxford in England, UK, I enjoyed most clinical specialties but then I encountered dermatology and, for some reason, seeing diseases on the skin was something I enjoyed very much, as well as the complexity of it. I had always been drawn to clinical pictures in medical books of unusual syndromes. I am someone who wants to know why, so being able to conduct research was appealing as well as, initially, daunting. Furthermore, there were two very inspiring female academics at Oxford then, Fenella Wojnarowska and Sue Burge, who were great role models for me.

The mission of the EADV is to provide education and training for dermatologists. Now, more energy is being placed on highlighting what dermatologists do and what skin diseases are, which is a good way of helping patients recognise that skin disorders are very important for all of us. Even if they are not life-threatening, most people have had, at least once in their life, a skin condition or skin request for the dermatologist. Advocacy of what the EADV represents across medicine and understanding the needs and expectations of patients are also very important.

More than two decades ago, during the 3-year course as a post-graduate trainee of internal medicine and working in the largest medical college of Asia, that too under a renowned diabetologist, I was exposed to handling an extremely busy diabetes clinic catering several hundred patients a day, with a limited backup supporting staff. I think this was the trigger for my keen interest in pursuing post-doctoral course in diabetes and endocrinology. Even during my undergraduate days, there was a notion that if you do not fully know how to treat diabetes and tuberculosis in India, you have not learnt anything about internal medicine. The field of diabetology was set to hold a great promise since a lot was left to be learnt about the complex pathophysiology including the management of Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).

The most exciting changes have actually been to the changes in format. The EASD this year is, again, a virtual meeting only. There’s a couple of interesting changes in format. First of all, we are starting not at 8 a.m. in the morning, Central European Summer Time, but 10 a.m.; and it goes on until 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. This is so that people in different time zones don’t have to get up at 3 in the morning or stay up until 3 at night at the end of each day.

I have always been interested in physiology and how the body works, and, during my PhD, I had the opportunity to work with models of glucose dysregulation. Many of us take the ability to control our blood glucose within a ‘healthy euglycaemic’ range for granted. It is only when things go wrong that we appreciate how complex this process is. My recent work has focused on Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), where individuals cannot produce their own insulin and rely on insulin replacement therapy.

In my previous role, I worked in the Pharma and was in the industry for about 20 years, but I felt that by working in medical affairs, I was also working closely with people. By with people, I mean people with diabetes first of all, and also with disease experts. So, in a role such as this, I would say that it involves working both for the company, with commercial interests, and for the real world, which is the world of patients and physicians. Being a bit in between, testing what disease experts and patients think about your solutions, and bringing that back internally to the company was really interesting for me.

Healthcare disparities and inequality are concepts that reflect aspects of differential healthcare access, disease and symptom management, and healthcare outcomes. Health inequalities can be defined as the “preventable, unfair and unjust differences in health status between groups, populations, or individuals that arise from the unequal distribution of social, environmental, and economic conditions within societies, which determine the risk of people getting ill, their ability to prevent sickness, or opportunities to take action and access treatment when ill health occurs.”1 Historically, disparities purely referred to a difference of some kind but, in recent years, the term has come to be synonymous with unfairness and inequality.