Most dermatology programs don't fail because the science is weak. They fail because no one tells the founder, until year three, what steps would have made the journey shorter and more fundable.
That's the gap AID's Development Leadership Council (DLC) was built to close. Its members are founders and industry leaders who've actually taken dermatology programs from bench to bedside, and who now spend time sharing hard-won lessons with the next wave of teams.
What the DLC Does
The Council supports AID's mission through three core efforts:
→ Entrepreneur Bootcamp at the Dermatology Innovation Forum (DIF): practical guidance on product development, clinical strategy, regulatory planning, and commercialization.
→ Networking + collaboration: connecting stakeholders and emerging therapies and technologies that could transform skin health.
→ DLC Office Hours: structured, 20-minute, pro bono consultations once a quarter via Zoom for early-stage dermatology companies.
In this installment of our DLC spotlight series, meet Jasmina Jankicevic, MD, MSc, CCRP.
Jasmina Jankicevic, MD, MSc, CCRP
Chief Medical and Scientific Officer
Dr. Jankicevic is a globally recognized thought leader in dermatology and medical aesthetics, specializing in drug and device development. She has spearheaded clinical development strategy and implementation across a wide range of sectors, including CROs, pharmaceutical/biotech companies, medical device firms, and cosmetic companies, driving the strategy and execution of over 350 clinical studies across more than 30 indications. She started as a practicing dermatologist in academia in the early 2000s. She quickly realized that seeing patients one at a time wasn't enough for her, a conviction that pulled her into product development, first leading product and treatment protocol development for a cosmetic company's center in Belgrade, Serbia, then relocating to the United States to lead clinical research for the same organization before moving fully into drug and device development across discovery, preclinical, translational, clinical, and medical affairs.
Dr. Jankicevic is a fractional Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for companies and an expert advisor to founders and investors. She currently serves as President of the Dermatologists in Industry Association. Jasmina co-chairs AID's Development Leadership Council alongside Vijendra Nalamothu and Michael Howell, bringing a clinical development and medical affairs lens to a Council that spans formulation, preclinical, and clinical expertise. She holds an MD and MSc from the University of Belgrade, is board-certified in Dermatology and Venereology, is a Certified Clinical Research Professional and a trained journalist, and is the author of more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and trade clinical research outlets.
Below, Jasmina shares what drives her, where she sees the biggest blind spots in dermatology development, and the advice she returns to most often when working with founders.
What inspired you to join AID's Development Leadership Council?
I kept watching excellent dermatologic science with a solid biological foundation stall out somewhere between the lab and the market, because no one told the founder until year three what steps to take to make the journey feasible and as short as possible. The DLC brings exactly that know-how. If we want to change how drug and device development strategy is built, we cannot just write an editorial about it. We help build the on-ramp.
What knowledge gaps do you see most often in early dermatology product development?
The most common knowledge gap is assuming that good science is enough to get funding. Brilliant science is merely the ticket to the table; it proves your mechanism works in a vacuum, but investors aren't funding science projects; they're funding commercial assets with a defined exit strategy. Good science reduces biological risk, but to secure capital, you also have to systematically eliminate business, regulatory, and execution risk, translating your data into a case that shows who will prescribe it, who will pay for it, how you'll protect it, and how the investor gets their money back.
The second misconception is that strong science alone determines the endpoint. It doesn't; the regulatory agency's expectation wins. In dermatology, that often means a two-grade IGA improvement to clear or almost clear, a demanding bar that has humbled many molecules. In topical development, the recurring blind spot is forgetting that vehicle matters and drives your PK, tolerability, and adherence. On the systemic side, it's dangerous to underestimate what chronic exposure demands. And very few companies start modeling reimbursement early enough, which turns commercial viability into a too-little-too-late problem down the line.
What's one product development lesson you've learned that you wish more early-stage founders knew?
Write your target label before you write your first study protocol. The label is the product. Define indication, population, dosing, warnings. Every study you run either earns a line on the label or spends money that doesn't. That discipline looks different by modality. Take dosing strategy as a focal point: for a topical, it forces you to decide early what ranges of disease severity and body-surface-area you can actually support. For an oral or subcutaneous agent, it forces you to consider whether your dosing interval is a differentiator or a liability. You do not want to execute a Phase 2 that produces a lovely publication and not enough evidence a regulator or an acquirer needs. It is the cheapest strategic exercise in development, and it's frequently skipped.
You've participated in AID's Entrepreneur Bootcamp. What value do you think it brings to founders or startups?
It compresses years of expensive mistakes into a few hours of free ones. Founders arrive convinced their hardest problem is scientific and leave understanding that it is usually regulatory strategy, capital sequencing, patent protection, or a target product profile they have never written down. Part of what makes it work is the range of expertise in the room, from discovery to commercialization and everything in between. The real value is being told the truth by people with no incentive to flatter you, in a setting where a "that will not work" statement lands as a gift rather than an insult.
Can you share a time when stakeholder collaboration made a meaningful difference in product development?
Two come to mind, one for a topical, one for a systemic drug. On the topical program, I joined as an expert advisor and quickly realized that the clinical team, the formulation team, and patient advisors each held about a third of the answer, and none of them were in the same meeting. When the company took my advice and finally put them in one room, patients said the regimen would fail in real life no matter how well it performed in a trial, formulators explained what a once-daily version would cost in time and resources, and the clinical team redesigned the study accordingly. That single 3-hour session I moderated moved the program more than any experiment run that year.
On the systemic side, I consulted for a company with a promising molecule targeting a new indication with no drug approved and an unclear regulatory path. In uncharted territory, the unknowns can overwhelm you unless you list them and bring in the right stakeholders to define the problem together. Months of tight collaboration got the preclinical work buttoned up, the target population clearly defined, and a proof-of-concept study designed that the agency accepted, and we gained additional funding along the way because we could present the path forward with confidence.
Either way, collaboration is how you find the constraint you didn't know you had.
What kind of informal advice or guidance do you find yourself offering most to emerging founders?
My advice is always specific to the founder's situation, but four things apply to everyone:
→ Fall in love with the patient problem, not the molecule. Molecules are replaceable; problems are durable and call for solutions.
→ Hire regulatory expertise about a year before it feels affordable and meet with the agency earlier than your board thinks necessary.
→ Design the trial you can actually enroll. Avoid at all costs writing inclusion and exclusion criteria that describe a patient who doesn't exist.
→ Guard your runway. Don't let the cause of your derm start-up's death be not having enough cash to reach a great readout.
Why is it important to create educational pathways for the next generation of skin health innovators?
We train physicians and scientists exquisitely well to be successful in helping one patient at a time, and teach them almost nothing about how to help a million at once. A resident can finish four years knowing how to manage severe atopic dermatitis but not what a 505(b)(2) is, how a device earns a de novo, what a biologics license application demands, or why their clinical insight is genuinely scarce in a boardroom. That's not a knowledge problem; it's an access problem. And access problems are solvable by design. If we don't build these pathways deliberately, innovation defaults to whoever happened to know someone in venture capital, and the field's priorities drift away from the patients who need us most.
What's one barrier to innovation that you believe the dermatology community must urgently address?
The fear of failing early. Many design early trials to generate encouraging results rather than to answer whether the program deserves to continue. A smart early-phase study protocol should ask four things: Did the drug reach the compartment where the target actually lives? Did it engage that target once it arrived? Can the signal be significantly separated from a vehicle or placebo response, clinically? And what clinical and translational outcome would make us stop? Making that discipline the standard is bigger than any single sponsor, and that's precisely the kind of problem a community like ours exists to solve.
What makes dermatology worth investing in right now, from both a clinical and commercial standpoint?
Investors are hunting for assets that offer a "pipeline in a product," where validating a single mechanism can unlock a multi-indication franchise. We still have massive unmet need in conditions with severe quality-of-life impact. For example, hidradenitis suppurativa, vitiligo, and chronic spontaneous urticaria alone represent multi-billion-dollar opportunities, and the rare dermatology space overall remains largely untapped. A de-risked Phase II asset with clean safety data and strong efficacy will draw competing bids from top-tier pharma.
Dermatology also offers a faster, cheaper path to proof. The target organ is visible, and we often can show definitive proof of concept in a Phase 1b or 2a trial within 12 to 16 weeks. Consequently, investors can reach a major valuation inflection point with relatively low capital burn, and clear regulatory pathways mean they're taking on biological risk without much regulatory risk.
Finally, there's a modality gap worth funding. We've transformed treatment for severe disease, but most patients present with mild-to-moderate disease, and there's real appetite for options that bridge the gap between weaker topicals and injectable biologics, whether that's biologic-like efficacy in an oral small molecule or non-steroidal topicals without black-box warnings.
Looking ahead 5–10 years, what role do you see AID and the Development Leadership Council playing in transforming dermatologic health?
I think we become the field's connective tissue. AID and the DLC become the place where a dermatologist with a good idea can find the regulatory, scientific, and capital expertise to test it without first having to get lucky. The scientific tailwinds are extraordinary: oral small molecules now delivering efficacy we once assumed required a biologic; targeted injectables reaching diseases that had essentially nothing a decade ago; real momentum in rare and neglected dermatoses; and long-overdue attention to skin of color and to global access. But tailwinds don't build products; infrastructure does, and that's our work. If we do it well, the measure of success in a decade won't be how many companies we advised. It will be that a young clinician-innovator, anywhere, no longer assumes translation is something other people get to do.
Ready to check out all that the DLC has to offer?
Learn more about our council: https://advancing-derm.org/platform/programs/leadership-councils/development/