Eingun James Song, MD: Upcoming Treatments for Psoriasis

Eingun James Song, MD, associate chief medical officer and the director of clinical research at Frontier Dermatology, spoke in an HCPLive interview about treatments in the pipeline for psoriasis as well as ways to personalize care for psoriasis patients in practice.

Song had participated in a presentation on ‘Clinical and Therapeutic Pearls in Psoriasis’ at the 2024 Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference in Hawaii, and this interview followed his presentation.

“I think personalized medicine is going to be the best way to improve patient treatment outcomes, because hopefully we can predict what type of patients are going to respond the best,” Song explained. “But also the least amount of side effects to a certain drug based on their patient profile. Of course, from a patient compliance standpoint, too, we need to make sure that the patient is agreeable to the type of medicine that we're going to be describing. So first off, you know, do they prefer an injection that we can do maybe once every couple of weeks to months? Or maybe a pill that they take once a day or once a week?”

Song noted that these questions represent the first branching point, in the case of personalized care for dermatology patients.

“But I think the patient's history, their past medical history in particular is important because sometimes if they have certain medical conditions, or maybe there are certain medications that will interact with the medicine that I'm going to prescribe that may not make that patient a great candidate,” Song said. “We also talked a little bit about the type of psoriasis they have, if they have more of a pustular type, I'm leaning more this way, if they have more of a hyperkeratotic type, I'm kind of going that way as well.”

Lastly, Song explained that one of the most important deciding factors for dermatologists to consider when personalizing care is insurance.

Song later described some of the latest treatment research on the horizon in the psoriasis space, describing what the field looks like right now in terms of new therapies.

“I think the sentiment has been that there isn't much new that's coming out for psoriasis compared to maybe some of the other inflammatory diseases,” Song said. “But actually, that's not the case. We have actually one very exciting oral agent that's being studied for psoriasis. This is an IL-23 peptide. So just like we have IL-23 inhibitors that are biologics, this oral medication has the potential to have the same type of efficacy, as well as safety as the IL-20 inhibitors. And the real advantage here is that it's just a once-a-day pill, and we already know the safety profile of this class.”

The tricky element, Song explained, is how patients can take a biologic orally, given that stomach acids are going to dissolve pills with very poor absorption. He added that this particular company has developed this therapy and gotten around this.

“We just had one that recently got approved, and this is an IL-17AF inhibitor called bimekizumab, and it targets an additional member of the IL-17 family that we know is very important in psoriatic disease,” Song said. “But in addition to that biologic, we also have newer technology called nanobody technology or antibody mimetics that are targeting maybe the same pathways, but they're produced in such a way where they're much smaller. They may be able to get better drug penetration compared to maybe some of our traditional monoclonal antibodies.”

To learn more about Song’s presentation, view the full interview segment above.

The quotes used in this summary were edited for the purposes of clarity.