Drug Approvals That Dr Aimee Tharaldson Is Keeping an Eye on for 2019

There's the potential for new nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and multiple sclerosis drugs to be approved in 2019, said Aimee Tharaldson, PharmD, a senior clinical consultant in Emerging Therapeutics for Express Scripts.

Transcript

Are there any drug approvals that you’re keeping a close eye on for 2019?

So, for 2019, we have the potential for some new nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NASH) drugs to be approved, and actually right now there’s nothing approved to treat NASH. This is a condition that affects up to 16 million Americans, and its associated with liver fat, liver inflammation, fibrosis, and it’s often associated with obesity and other concurrent conditions can be affected in patients with NASH. Again, nothing is proved to treat them but next year we could see 2 new drugs approved. 2020 there’s even more, there’s several drugs with different mechanisms in development for NASH. So, it’s going to be interesting to see how that market progresses over time.

As far as other drugs for 2019 we’re keeping an eye on, there’s going to be some new oral therapies for multiple sclerosis (MS) that are going to be competing in the market. So, Cladribine is a new oral drug. Then we have some competitors to Gilenya, so Gilenya is going to be going generic, but there are 2 new medications with similar mechanisms, which may have better safety profiles that could be approved. One of them, Siponimod, is for secondary progressive MS, which currently has no approved treatment therapies. So, those are just a few examples of key drugs to watch for next year.