In this video, Andrew Blauvelt, MD, MBA, discusses the results of the IMMhance study and the implications for patient quality of life.
Dr Blauvelt is the president of the Oregon Medical Research Center in Portland, OR. He has previously served as an investigator on various trials, including several clinical studies on the efficacy of risankizumab, an IL-23 inhibitor for the treatment of psoriasis.
To read more about the comparative efficacy of risankizumab and the latest results from Dr Blauvelt, visit our Dermatology Advances resource.
Read the transcript:
This was a study mandated by the FDA, and they actually require a randomized withdraw study for all new biologics. And the reason for that is that they want to make sure, even though I don’t know why they’re continuing to do now, over so many years, but they want to make sure that the drugs are not cures and that they still need to stay on them. So, patients are either, in a blinded manner, kept on drug or withdrawn from drug to test that hypothesis that medication is still required to stay clear, to treat the disease.
The striking thing in this study is that this is the longest, the numbers you just quoted for the loss of PASI 90 and the loss of PGA 3, are the longest time periods for any known drug that we have for psoriasis. So that’s really kind of the distinguishing factor that after standard dosing for 28 weeks in the study, a large percentage of patients can go without dosing for a very long period of time.
So, why is that important for patient quality of life? So, first of all, we’re not recommending that patients go off drug, because the main conclusion of the paper is that patients need continual dosing every 12 weeks to maintain the best treatment of their psoriasis. But then we say, in cases where patients have been, for example, lost health insurance or suffered an illness and weren’t able to dose, or for whatever reason they missed dosing and were coming off drug, and usually in the US that’s due to loss of health insurance so they can no longer get it covered, this paper gives insight on what happens or what can happen when people are taken off drug. So it’s not recommended that people try to see how long they can go, but it is now we have firm data that, as you quoted, 50% of patients can go a very, very, very long time, three quarters of a year without dosing.
In a world where limited resources or limited ability to pay for drug or limited insurance coverage of drug, could some patients get by with one or two treatments per year as opposed to the standard four? The answer is yes. Again, in those scenarios where patients for whatever reason need to be pulled off their medication, this study says that half of patients can go three-quarters of the year and be just fine without the continued dosing every three months.
