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UCB EHSF 2024
Advances in hidradenitis suppurativa
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Transcript: The implications of new treatments for patients

Declaration of sponsorship UCB Biopharma SRL
Last updated:5th Nov 2024
Published:5th Nov 2024

Martina Porter

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It'll be really exciting, I think in the next few years to have options for HS. One of the things that I always tell patients and even my colleagues that are I think kind of just sort of getting started in using biologics for HS treatment is that I would equate these to kind of the early days of psoriasis where we were using etanercept for patients and it was much, much more effective than any of the therapies that we had prior to biologics.

But there's still a little bit of a ways to go in terms of being able to tease out what the final therapy is for patients. There will be some patients I think that respond better to TNF-alpha inhibitors, for example, versus IL-17 inhibitors, either the IL-17A or IL-17F. And we currently don't have head-to-head studies about which one we should use.

And so a lot of the decisions I think will be made based on availability of the drug, cost of the drug, and then any sort of real life or real world experience that people have where they're starting to trial IL-17A inhibitors first versus TNF-alpha inhibitors. And I think for patients, the safety profile and the comorbidity will also matter, but the reality is that a good number of poor patients that have HS will probably end up taking both therapies because one or both is are inadequate for them. And so on some level it may not matter right away which one they start with, as long as they're really starting on any biologic therapy. And then I think the other thing is to really note that this is a disease that doesn't improve instantaneously.

And so it will take a good three to six months on therapy before patients will get to kind of their final improvement or their best improvement after starting. And so there's gonna have to be some patience involved before we quickly change over from one therapy to another. But hopefully over time we'll have many, many more options. And for some of our most severe patients, I would imagine that we'll actually be using some of these therapies in combination because some of the patients I think, have very complex disease that may be driven by more than one thing.

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