Andrea Murina, MD: Drug Pipeline for Hidradenitis Suppurativa

The 44th Annual Fall Clinical Dermatology Conference in Las Vegas featured a seminar-in-depth presentation titled ‘The Evolving Therapeutic Landscape of Hidradenitis Suppurativa’ which was supported by an educational grant from UCB, Inc.

The HCPLive editorial team spoke with presenter Andrea Murina, MD, associate professor of dermatology and program director at Tulane University School of Medicine. Murina was asked about some of the talk’s most important highlights.

“One of the things we know about HS is that, because patients are experiencing a delay of diagnosis,” Murina explained. “They also have severe symptoms at the time that they come into our offices, and the most common symptom is pain. So one of the objectives was to really broaden the consideration for biologic therapies to include patients who have abscesses and nodules but also have a huge impact on their quality of life.”

Murina noted that some of these impacts include trouble with restricted movement, issues sitting due to pain, a lot of drainage, malodorous drainage, and pain of the inflammation and swelling. During the meeting, Murina focused on the early window of opportunity for treatment using anti-inflammatory drugs like biologic therapies.

“We dove into the biologic therapies that are approved for HS, including adalimumab and secukinumab,” Murina said. “But we also went into really important drugs coming up in the future that may allow our patients to achieve higher levels of clearance for the HS, which include things like bimekizumab.”

Murina was asked about the current drug pipeline and upcoming treatments for HS patients.

“We mentioned bimikizumab which selectively targets IL-17 A and F,” Murina said. “What's nice about that is we were able to show both 1 year and 2 year data from the trials which showed high levels of high score 50, but also reported high score 75, 90, and 100. So it really brings up the fact that we may be able to make more progress with getting patients to a higher level of clearance, which is very exciting in the HS space.”

To find out more about this information, view the full interview posted above the summary. For additional conference coverage information, view our most recent conference coverage.

The quotes implemented in this summary were edited for the purposes of clarity.