April W. Armstrong, MD, MPH: Psoriasis Treatment Breakthroughs, Future Predictions

During a segment of her HCPLive interview, April W. Armstrong, MD, MPH, discussed more specifics on the data regarding psoriasis therapies that she presented at the 2022 Fall Clinical Dermatology Conference.

Armstrong, known for her work as a professor of dermatology and as associate dean of clinical research and at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, described new data on 3 major types of psoriasis treatment: bimekizumab, deucravacitinib, and upadacitinib.

“As you have said, we do have a lot of therapeutic options available,” she explained. “And therefore when we have these new medications, it's very important that they have something unique about them.”

Armstrong explained several different aspects of the various treatments, first exploring the topic of deucravacitinib, the oral, allosteric TYK2 inhibitor.

Deucravacitinib has become known as the first oral, once-per-day treatment for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis.

“So this is a first-in-class mechanism action that we have not seen before in our field,” Armstrong said. “So it's very novel in that sense, and it inhibits a intracellular molecule that's really critical to the psoriasis pathogenesis.”

Later in the interview, Armstrong went on to describe upadacitinib, an oral JAK inhibitor for psoriatic arthritis treatment.

“For upadacitinib, I think we are looking at high efficacy rates for psoriatic arthritis with this oral JAK inhibitor,” she said. “Now this JAK inhibitor is to be used in patients who are either intolerant or have not achieved their response with (tumour necrosis factor) inhibitors. So it's good to know that we have options for those patients, for example, who have failed TNF inhibitors in the past.”

Finally, Armstrong discussed data regarding the monoclonal IgG1 antibody known as bimekizumab.

“That means that we are seeing that particular mechanism of action being translated to this exceptional level of clinical response that we see,” she said. “The number of patients that are clear by bimekizumab, for example, by 4 months of time is higher than probably anything that we've seen thus far.”

Armstrong concluded that combination therapies along with topical non-steroidals and systemics may be a new modality of combination that may become part of daily practice for those in the dermatology field.

For more information on the data presented by Armstrong, view the interview above.