Future Directions in Psoriasis Treatment: Innovations and Implications

Announcer:

You're listening to On the Frontlines of Psoriasis on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Andrew Blauvelt will share his insights on the evolving treatment landscape for psoriasis. Dr. Blauvelt is a dermatologist and clinical researcher with a focus on innovative treatments for psoriasis. Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Blauvelt: 

So if we look at the future of psoriasis therapy, I see several interesting things on the horizon. One of them is the continued development of novel oral drugs for psoriasis. We’ve had 20+ years of terrific advancements in the biologic arena with amazing drugs that can give high levels of complete clearance in patients. We have not had the same kind of advances with oral therapies for psoriasis, although we’re getting there.

So we kind of started with apremilast years ago. Then we had a nice advancement and a very nice improvement with deucravacitinib. And what we see in the oral medicine arena is that there’s going to be several more TYK2 inhibitors likely to be approved by the FDA in the next several years. And then we have other oral agents that are selectively targeting IL-23, a key cytokine in psoriasis pathogenesis, and the efficacy and safety of the new TYK2 inhibitors as well as the selective IL-23 inhibitors seem terrific. It seems like we are continuing to advance and improve efficacy with little safety concerns with these novel oral drugs that are coming up.

In terms of new biologic therapies that I’m excited about, we are more and more interested in testing higher doses of interleukin-23 inhibitors to try to increase complete clearance rates and also to decrease the amount of injections that patients have to get. So there’s several strategies in development now that are looking at the possibility of treating patients only once a year with a shot for psoriasis, which I think would be terrific. You know, you go in the fall and get your flu shot and your psoriasis shot, and you’re taken care of for the whole year. And I do think we’re moving in that direction, so we’re even improving more upon the great biologics that we currently have to offer our patients. 

Announcer:

That was Dr. Andrew Blauvelt talking about potential future treatments for psoriasis. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit On the Frontlines of Psoriasis on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!