Dr Robert Fante: More Data Will Provide More Insight Into Use of Teprotumumab for TED

As more data is gathered on the treatment of teprotumumab for thyroid eye disease (TED), we’ll have a better understanding of which subgroups respond better or worse to the treatment, explained Robert G. Fante, MD, FACS, president of the American Society of Ophthalmic Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery and facial plastic surgeon and cosmetic surgeon, Fante Eye & Face Centre in Denver, Colorado.

Transcript

The pivotal studies for teprotumumab have had pretty small cohorts. What are the benefits we'll see when we start getting larger patient population studies?

I think there'll be a lot of benefits from that. Clearly the studies have been powerful enough to give us statistical significance to permit the FDA to act and to allow all of us to be able to use this drug and feel like we have a reasonably good chance of success.

That said, as we have larger cohorts and more information, we'll have a lot more data; it'll be useful to help us recognize which subgroups it's most helpful for or which subgroups is least helpful for, or whether that turns out to be any variation between men and women, for example, or among children and adults or whether there's particular subtypes that we cannot identify clinically, for whom we decide this is the great the best therapy we've got or perhaps there's something better.

Also, I suspect that as research goes on, we'll learn about other kinds of drugs that are similar that may still be in the pipeline that might be helpful. So, I suspect that the future for this is very bright, both for this drug and our ability to use it effectively in patients as we get more data and have more controlled trials that are available to us. And then also for the future of thyroid eye disease, that this will be the beginning of a new era in treatment where instead of dealing only with some of the most obvious problems and, sort of secondarily, dealing with symptoms with things like surgery, we’ll have a way to prevent some of the problems, substantially limiting the burden on society, and, obviously, the burden on individual patients.