Zasocitinib’s Potential as an Oral Treatment for Psoriasis

The phase 2b study showed zocitinib reduced psoriasis severity and improved quality of life, leading to fewer health care interactions, says April Armstrong, MD, MPH, chief of dermatology, UCLA.

This transcript was lightly edited.

Transcript

How does the introduction of zasocitinib as a treatment option align with improving long-term patient outcomes and quality of life among this patient population?

When we're thinking about our psoriasis patients, it's very important to offer them options that really align with their preferences of how they take their medications. Zasocitinib is an exciting development because it's looking at a pathway that we know is proven to be effective, but also refining on that pathway such that we can possibly deliver even greater efficacy to treat psoriasis. As an oral option for patients with psoriasis, I see zasocitinib help improve patients' quality of life and their outcomes in other arenas, as well.

What role could zasocitinib play in reducing the burden of psoriasis-related health care utilization?

As is shown by the clinical trials, zasocitinib decreases psoriasis severity in terms of both signs as well as symptoms. In addition, zasocitinib also improves patients quality of life. And when we take that all together, we know that when patient’s psoriasis is well controlled, they tend to really focus on areas of [their] lives that are important to them, such as their family and their work. As such, they can, over time, utilize [the] health care system less, because they don't need to be in emergency situations where they need to treat psoriasis flares, because they have this long-term control. So, I think what we are seeing here is that having an option that gets our psoriasis patients disease under control such that they can overall have fewer touch points with the health care system because of that and really focus on what's important to them.

How does the safety profile of zasocitinib compare with other existing therapies, and what implications might this have for patient adherence and long-term management of psoriasis?

In this study, it's a phase 2b study, we looked at the safety profile of zasocitinib across 4 different doses. Overall, what we found was that zasocitinib was found to be safe and well tolerated. This is important for patients in terms of an oral therapy. It is a therapy that will need to be taken over a long time, as psoriasis is a chronic disease that needs long-term control. Also, what we see is that the safety profile of zasocitinib is very similar to what we note in terms of other TYK2 inhibitors, and some of the adverse events that occurred in low rates included acne and folliculitis. Most were treatable without discontinuation of zasocitinib.

Also, there were not laboratory abnormalities associated with zasocitinib. So, what we see overall is that the TYK2 pathway is well defined and is the pathway that I think as a community we're converging on in terms of oral therapies for patients with psoriasis that delivers efficacy and also good safety and tolerability.