Dr Jeff Stark: Bimekizumab Shows Long-Term Efficacy When Used to Treat Patients With HS

This content was produced independently by The American Journal of Managed Care^® and is not endorsed by the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD).

Jeff Stark, MD, vice president and head of medical immunology at Union Chimique Belge, explained that the week 48 results when using bimekizumab-bkzx to treat patients with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) showed long-term efficacy.

Despite these results, he noted that bimekizumab is still considered an investigational therapy for HS treatment as it has not yet received FDA approval.

Transcript

What implications do the sustained improvements in skin pain and reductions in draining tunnel count have for the long-term management and treatment of HS?

Long-term results are very important for patients living with HS. It's a chronic condition, we consider it a condition that we might aim for remission but we don't yet have a cure for. So, being able to provide long-term and sustainable results is really quite important.

We were very pleased to share our placebo-controlled, shorter-term results last year at AAD, and, this year, now bringing longer-term results out at week 48. To be able to speak to not only a quick improvement, which in and of itself is very important to patients but also long-term sustainability is equally important for a chronic lifelong disease.

We're happy to share those 48-week results here, looking at things like pain and draining tunnels and being able to demonstrate the effectiveness of a therapy like bimekizumab over longer periods of time for those patients who need long-term results.

How do these findings contribute to the understanding of bimekizumab-bkzx’s potential as a therapeutic option for patients with moderate-to-severe HS? How might they influence clinical practice and patient care with FDA approval?

Bimekizumab, at this point, is still an investigational therapy for the treatment of HS. We have submitted an application to the FDA for, we hope, a future indication in this area, and we'll be watching that process very, very carefully. We do hope that at a point in the future bimekizumab will be an available treatment option for patients with HS, and I think that the data that we're presenting here give us optimism about that process for the future.

We do know that, unlike other inflammatory skin diseases where there are highly effective therapies, HS is still a disease state where the available therapies are not always controlling the disease for a majority of patients. There is much work to be done in this area. We need additional research that helps us understand the immune dysregulation that is going on in HS. We need therapies that are addressing new components of that immune dysregulation so that we can control it and lead to better disease control for these patients.

We're hopeful that with these data that we're bringing, with new mechanisms of action, like bimekizumab that inhibits both IL [interleukin]-17 A and F, that we will move the needle in terms of being able to provide an additional element of disease control for patients who don't always have an effective solution available for them today.