Brett King, MD, on Emerging and Potential Uses of JAK Inhibitors

Dr King discusses the emerging and potential uses for Janus kinase inhibitors in treating autoimmune diseases, including dermatological conditions.

Brett King, MD, is an associate professor of dermatology at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. My name is Brett King. I am associate professor of dermatology at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Today, I am going to talk to you about JAK inhibitors.

It is really exciting to think about the emerging uses of JAK inhibitors again across all of medicine, but I think the subspecialty of dermatology really highlights the incredible importance of JAK inhibitors.

In the next several months, we're going to see FDA approval of 1 to 3 oral JAK inhibitors for the treatment of atopic dermatitis or eczema. Probably in the next year or so, we're going to see the first topical JAK inhibitor, FDA-approved also in atopic dermatitis, and hopefully soon thereafter, vitiligo.

We're going to have oral JAK inhibitors for the treatment of alopecia areata, a disease for which currently there are no FDA-approved therapies. Alopecia areata, of course, is an autoimmune form of hair loss.

A group of those people will often have severe disease with no hair at all on their bodies. It's an often devastating disease. The potential of JAK inhibitors there is particularly exciting for patients.

Vitiligo is another autoimmune disease characterized by the loss of pigment, or melanocytes in the skin. Again here, JAK inhibitors are showing incredible promise. We've recently seen a paper in The Lancet of a phase II clinical trial of topical ruxolitinib, and the results are promising. There's also an oral JAK inhibitor called ritlecitinib that is in clinical trials for vitiligo.

Beyond these things, there are anecdotal reports and case series across numerous diseases showing again the incredible promise of JAK inhibitors for the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory disease.

Thank you very much for your time. I hope that you've found this discussion of JAK inhibitors and their emerging role across medicine to be helpful and informative. Bye-bye.