Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to On the Frontlines of CIDP on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Sami Khella, who’s the Director of the Clinical Electrophysiology and a Professor of Clinical Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. He’ll be discussing treatment guidelines for chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, or CIDP. Let’s hear from Dr. Khella now.
Dr. Khella:
For patients who have other comorbidities that preclude steroid use—for example, somebody with bad osteoporosis—you don’t want to give them high-dose, long-term steroids. For somebody with bad diabetes that’s poorly controlled or where they’re noncompliant, for example, steroids or other immunosuppressants may not be a great way to treat them, and those patients might benefit from having a nurse coming into the home with home-infused IVIG, which is also a first-line therapy. So I think you have to tailor the treatment to avoid the obstacles, if you will, for treating CIDP patients.
There is an FDA-approved therapy, efgartigimod, which is an injectable medication that just came on the market, and this is the first time that the FDA has approved a new therapy since IVIG was approved many years ago after the ICE trial. Efgartigimod, of course, is an FcRn inhibitor, and so I like to think of it as a chemical plasma exchange or chemical plasmapheresis which removes the antigen or the antibody that’s being made which behaves as an antigen to the nerve. So efgartigimod is a new advancement, and that helps expand the therapeutic armamentarium. Now, of course, the complement inhibitors are being tested right now. Other FcRn inhibitors are being tested.
So there are a number of therapies on the horizon, and I think it’s a really exciting time in treating this really by and large treatable disease.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Sami Khella talking about treatment guidelines for CIDP. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit On the Frontlines of CIDP on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!