Guselkumab Improves Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients with PsA

Rheumatology Network interviewed Terence Rooney, MD, to discuss the recent findings, presented at the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) 2022 conference, indicating that guselkumab provided patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) with sustained improvements in measures of health-related quality of life through 2 years. Rooney is Vice President, Rheumatology and Maternal-Fetal Immunology Disease Area Stronghold Leader at Janssen.

“Psoriatic arthritis is a complex disorder affecting many millions of patients who have remaining significant unmet needs,” Rooney stated. “Despite important improvements and treatment over recent years, they still suffer from problems with their joints, skin, and back. And many of the consequences of those issues relate to quality of life, including specific issues around things like pain, fatigue, and aspects like work productivity.”

Guselkumab works by neutralizing interleukin-23 (IL-23), an important driver of the signs and symptoms that affect patients with psoriatic diseases. “It's important that patients feel better fast, but also have durable improvements in those aspects of disease,” Rooney explained. “These are long term illnesses that require long term treatments. It’s important for patients, the doctors looking after them, and other health care professionals, know that the treatments that they select to help with these aspects of this important disease work quickly but also work in a very sustained way.”

Other data presented at the conference included analyses for the future of measuring outcomes in these disorders, such as using artificial intelligence and machine learning to better target treatments and improve outcome measures.

“Psoriatic arthritis has come a long way over the last 20 years since I began in clinical practice in this disorder,” Rooney concluded. “Whereas 20 years ago, very few highly effective treatments were available. Patients thankfully now have several treatment options. We were pleased to be able to share data from our large late-phase clinical trial programs that showed that guselkumab was able to produce rapid and sustained improvements across each of those important dimensions of disease…Together those programs resulted in the approval of guselkumab for the treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and now have produced data that go through 2 years in psoriatic arthritis.”