The Future of Oral Therapy for Psoriasis Management

Offering multiple medication administration options, including oral therapies, can increase patient adherence and satisfaction, says April Armstrong, MD, MPH, chief of dermatology, UCLA.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

How does an oral treatment option benefit patients with psoriasis?

For patients with psoriasis, I think offering them multiple different options in terms of how they would like to take their medications is really important, whether it's topical, oral or biologics, which are mostly injectables. This particular study focusing on an oral therapy, a TYK2 inhibitor, with good efficacy and safety profile, will offer patients another oral therapy, and many of our patients with moderate to severe psoriasis also prefer to have that option available. I think that will increase their likelihood also adhering to the therapy by choosing a route of administration that many of our patients prefer.

What are the next steps to ensure that the efficacy and safety findings of zasocitinib are generalizable to a larger patient population?

I think it is always important to include a diverse patient population in our clinical trials. These phase 2b studies enroll patients from the United States and Canada, and this clinical trial had 7% Black [individuals], which is similar to and a little bit higher than the expected 5.7% Black patients affected among the psoriasis patient population in the general US cohort. I will say overall, what we see in terms of the rates of Black patients in the patients, it mirrors what we see in the United States. And of course, in future studies, we will continue to ensure that diverse patients are included in the clinical trials.