Dr Ogdie, from the University of Pennsylvania, reviews her poster presentation from ACR Convergence 2022 on response rates among patients treated with risankizumab based on the number of swollen and tender joints, from the KEEPsAKE 1 and 2 trials.

Alexis Ogdie, MD, is an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

TRANSCRIPT:

Alexis Ogdie:

Hi, my name is Alexis Ogdie. I'm associate professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and I'm coming to you today at the ACR 2022 in Philadelphia, at home. So I'm presenting an abstract today on risankizumab and response rates among patients in the trials, depending on what their joint counts were at baseline. So this data was from the KEEPsAKE 1 and KEEPsAKE 2 trials. KEEPsAKE 1 was among patients with psoriatic arthritis who were csDMARD inadequate responders, but biologic naive. And KEEPsAKE 2 was among patients who were biologic inadequate responders.

In these trials, patients were randomized to risankizumab or placebo, and in order to get into the trial, they had to have 5 or more tender and swollen joint counts. So in this particular study, we wanted to know whether having lower joint counts at baseline was associated with better response rates than patients with higher joint counts, let's say. So we examined patients who had 5 to 8 swollen or tender joint counts, and then those who had 9 or more, and compared ACR20/50/70 response rates, as well as the achievement of lower disease activity levels, in which we defined using MDA and cDAPSA, 2 of our common targets that we use in psoriatic arthritis.

So looking at the combined data, the patients that were in the slightly lower joint counts compared to the higher joint counts had slightly lower ACR20/50/70 response rates. This is something that we know to be true because the higher you start, the more opportunity you have to change, and so you can see more ACR20/50/70 response rates by the higher joint counts. And it's very small differences between those groups, so no clear winner, if you will. Then, when we look at achievement of lower disease activity levels; if you start lower, it's easier to get people into the minimal disease activity or cDAPSA. And again, this is something we know from a methods perspective that the lower you start, the easier to get you lower, as opposed to the higher you start, the farther you have to go to get to one of those levels.

There were small differences, but really there was still a significant difference from placebo in both of those 2 groups, in the lower joint counts and the higher joint counts. So the drug worked across both groups, it's just that those patients who started a little bit lower were easier to get into lower disease states. So in summary, risankizumab was significantly better than placebo even when you cut the data by lower joint counts versus higher joint counts. The caveat is that this is still all polyarticular disease, all polyarticular disease not represented in this type of clinical trial. Thanks so much for your attention.