Lawrence Eichenfield, MD: Long-Term Disease Control with Ruxolitinib Cream for Atopic Dermatitis

In this interview with the HCPLive editorial team, Lawrence Eichenfield, MD, a discussion was featured on recent findings regarding ruxolitinib cream and its long-term disease control with as-needed use among those with atopic dermatitis (AD).

Eichenfield is known for his work as the chief of pediatric and adolescent dermatology at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego as well as professor of dermatology and pediatrics and vice-chair of UC San Diego School of Medicine’s dermatology department.

“I actually love this study and some of the data that was put together, sort of flushing out what it did,” Eichenfield said. “We did a standard 8-week, twice-a-day, short term treatment with topical ruxolitinib, knowing that this topical JAK-inhibitor brings efficacy and good skin response. And that was shown in that short term trial, where patients use vehicle control. So that was ruxolitinib cream without the cream in it…But after that 8-week time period, patients were rolled over into an open label study if they wanted to keep going with it. And patients were all put on ruxolitinib at that point.”

Eichenfield explained that what was positive about the study was that if patients were clear or almost clear, they could stop their treatment or they could continue to use it if they needed to keep their disease under control.

“So as an example, we looked at the outcome measures presence, we looked at the body surface area,” he said. “The body surface area at baseline was almost 10%, which was 9.6. That's about 10 hands of eczema. In the 8-week study it quickly came down to under 3% body surface area, approaching 2 very rapidly. Then in the 1-year study, we ended up with that body surface area being maintained low, less than 2, the whole time and ending up at about 1.4%.”

Eichenfield explained that the data showed there was good disease control over time in this population, noting that this was true continuous use as-needed.

“The data point which really looked at this and showed that it was just about 50% of the time, patients were off treatment,” Eichenfield said. “So 43.9% of the time, patients were off treatment because the eczema was clear. So that's very exciting, since it shows you can control the disease without treating it all the time.”

To learn more from this interview with Eichenfield, view the full video segment above.

The quotes contained in this description were edited for clarity.