Dr Jeff Stark: Patients With Hidradenitis Suppurativa Have Improved Pain Management With Bimekizumab

Treatment with bimekizumab-bkzx led to continued long-term improvements in pain and reductions in draining tunnel counts over 48 weeks, says Jeff Stark, MD, vice president, head of medical immunology, UCB.

Transcript

How do improvements in skin pain correlate with the overall quality of life for patients living with moderate to severe hidradenitis suppurativa (HS)?

As you discuss symptoms with HS patients, what impacts them the most, what interferes with their quality of life the most, there are a few things that are almost universally mentioned by patients with HS. One of those is certainly pain. Pain is linked primarily to the acute inflammation of the disease, and really is one of the things that HS patients experience most prominently, that interferes with their ability to have a high quality of life, that interferes with their work productivity, etc. And so, to be able to address that component of disease that's driven by the acute inflammation is very important. It certainly is not the only impactful symptom that patients with HS experience. There are others related to tissue damage from that inflammation, that includes things like draining tunnels, for example. But acute pain is a significant factor for most patients living with HS and one that we hope to address and improve by treating the inflammation associated with the disease.

Can you provide an overview on the sustained reductions in draining tunnel count observed in patients treated with bimekizumab-bkzx compared with placebo over the 48-week period?

Draining tunnels in HS are another symptom that is very impactful to patients with the disease and is a significant impedance to their high quality of life. If we think about pain as being a manifestation of acute inflammation, draining tunnels are one of those manifestations that are a longer-term consequence of untreated inflammation. And if you think about what patients with draining tunnels may experience; these patients may experience sudden drainage that occurs without warning, it can happen in the middle of their workday, it can happen as they're going about their regular social activities and can be a major source of embarrassment for them. It's a reason why they have to use dressings to control that drainage. Many of these patients even report a foul odor associated with that drainage, and you can appreciate how impactful that is on their daily routine and their social interaction.

This is something that we really want to see improving. We're very happy to see those improvements in bimekizumab-treated patients in our clinical trial program. We actually see several important thresholds of improvement in our data that we presented here at AAD [American Academy of Dermatology]. We see, for example, that by week 48, 50% of bimekizumab-treated patients had no draining tunnels, which is very exciting to see for those patients. But we also see that patients with a higher burden of draining tunnels at baseline—so those who had 5 or more a significant proportion of those patients—80% experienced a reduction in the number of 3 or more draining tunnels. So even those patients with a higher burden of draining tunnels at baseline, high numbers of them had a significant reduction in those number of draining tunnels. Again, [that’s] something that's very important for these patients and their quality of life, and which we're very happy to see in the bimekizumab clinical program for HS.