Dr Laura Coates reviews research she and colleagues conducted on the safety of risankizumab for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis.

Laura Coates, MBBS, is associate professor in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences at the University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom and is a National Institute for Health Research Clinician Scientist focusing on therapeutic strategies in psoriatic arthritis.

Transcript:

Hello, my name's Laura Coates and I'm a rheumatologist from the University of Oxford in the UK. I'm joining you here from San Diego at the ACR Convergence meeting in 2023, and I'm going to share some insights about a poster that I'm presenting here. So this poster is looking at the safety data from pooled studies of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis in the use of risankizumab and IL-23p19 inhibitor.

I think one of the really interesting things about these drugs is that they do seem to have very good safety data, and that's obviously really important. We want drugs that work well, but we want drugs to be safe as well. And it's very reassuring the data that we've seen across IL-23s before. So this study pooled the data in the psoriasis studies and then the data in the psoriatic arthritis studies. It looked at safety data in those two different populations, and it compared it to background safety data risk from the PSOLAR registry for patients who are not on biologics, but have psoriasis. And also from the UK GP dataset, the CPRD dataset, which is a primary care dataset in the UK.

So it is got some kind of nice population comparisons, which is useful. And essentially this study or this analysis showed that there was very consistent data across all the studies. The safety issues seem to be very similar in psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. And the risk of most of those key safety issues that we would consider seems to be pretty low, and in most cases, very similar to the background population risk. So that's things like serious infections. So serious infections was seen at a rate of about 1.1 to 1.5 serious infections per 100 patient years. And that's pretty similar to the background risk that we see in psoriasis or in the GP population. Similar data around MACE, so cardiovascular side effects didn't seem to be particularly increased either in the psoriasis or the PSA group.

And no key issues with things like depression and infection kind of reactivation. Low risks of cancer as well. So again, kind of one of those key safety things that patients often ask about or are concerned about, and again, low risks and seems very comparative to the normal population. So I think this is a really good analysis bringing together a lot of data sets. It's really good with safety studies to have big combined data sets with longer follow-up to try and get a better idea of the safety profile of a drug. And this seems to be very reassuring with low rates of adverse events in both the psoriasis population and the psoriatic arthritis population when treated with risankizumab.