Ahmad Amin, MD: Selecting the Best Biologics for Your Psoriasis Patient

During this interview segment with HCPLive, Ahmad Amin, MD, FAAD, spoke about his presentation titled ‘Biological Bootcamp: How to Select the Best Biologics for Your Psoriasis Patient.’

Amin is known for his work as an Associate Professor of Dermatology at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Psoriasis Program and co-director of the Multidisciplinary Psoriatic Arthritis Clinic at Northwestern Medicine.

“One of the points that I made at the talk was that I think that the number of treatment options, (specifically) biologic treatment options for patients with psoriasis has really just exploded over the last 5 to 6 years,” Amin said. “When I was in residency, I think we had like maybe 2 or 3 options. And now fast forward to 2023 and we have such a large number of more options to treat.”

He then pointed out that sometimes when patients and clinicians have so many available, it can be difficult to decide which one is best, adding that it can lead to decision paralysis when one has so many things to choose from.

“And so, I thought it was really important to kind of just lay everything out there,” Amin explained. “To weigh all the options out there and help find a way to help people organize all these options so that they can sort of choose which biologics that they want to start using as they see patients.”

When asked about some of the biologic and systemic treatments that he highlighted in his presentation, he spoke more about the talk.

“We were more focused on biologic medicines, but we did include some of the oral small molecules that also help treat psoriasis…” he said. “Among the biologic classes that we that we talked about were anti-TNF drugs, which were some of the first biologics on the market to treat psoriasis. They've been around for a long time, we have a lot of history with them.”

Amin pointed out that the market recently moved a bit towards some of the newer biologics in the last few years.

“And so we also talked about the interleukin-17 blockers, and also the interleukin-23 blockers, which is where I think the 2 mechanisms of action that a lot of us use in our clinic very much to treat patients with psoriasis. And then the 2 small oral molecules that we talked about, which were apremilast and deucravacitinib.”

For more on Amin’s conference presentation, view the full interview segment above.

The quotes contained in this interview description were edited for clarity.