On June 18, 2025 the National Psoriasis Foundation (NPF) and the psoriatic disease community will unite in celebration of the profound contributions of Joel M. Gelfand, M.D., Carol Ostrow, and Jose U. Scher, M.D., to the mission to drive efforts to cure psoriatic disease and improve the lives of all those affected.
In advance of the Commit to Cure Gala in New York City, we sat down with the honorees to learn a little about their connection to this community and their messages for people who live with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.
Q&A with Joel M. Gelfand, M.D., MSCE, FAAD – 2025 Commit to Cure Gala Honoree
Question: Tell us about your work with the National Psoriasis Foundation?
I've been engaging with the National Psoriasis Foundation for the past 20 years, on a variety of different initiatives. The NPF has most recently been engaged as a funder and partner in our cardiovascular disease research program. This research project is focused on lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease in people living with psoriasis by working with dermatologists across the U.S to better counsel patients, better screen for cardiovascular risk factors, and better treat those risk factors.
The NPF was also an important collaborator on an at-home phototherapy study, known as the LITE Study. The LITE Study, which enrolled 783 patients from 42 dermatology practices nationwide, demonstrated that home phototherapy is as effective as in-office treatment. Recently, a major national health insurance company changed their policy to make home phototherapy much more readily accessible to patients with psoriasis based on the positive results of LITE.
Question: How has the National Psoriasis Foundation played a role in your career?
The National Psoriasis Foundation has played a major role in my career. First, what people don't often recognize is how important it is to have their advocacy at the federal level to ensure that psoriatic diseases are being studied. My ability to study psoriasis in the U.S. population is based on the National Psoriasis Foundation's ability to advocate, which has resulted in the Centers for Disease Control collecting data on people living with psoriasis. From this data, we better defined the epidemiology and burden of psoriasis in the US, determined that there are up to 3.6 million adults in the US with psoriasis who remain undiagnosed, and we determined that patients with psoriasis rarely get screened for cardiovascular risk factors by their dermatologist – an evidence to practice gap that we are trying to address with our current research.