Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD: Looking to the Future of Generalized Pustular Psoriasis Research

After the decision by the National Psoriasis Foundation’s Medical Board to update their consensus statements providing guidance on management of generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, spoke about the decision in an interview with the HCPLive editorial team.

In this segment of his HCPLive interview, Chovatiya, an assistant professor of dermatology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, discussed the guidelines’ impact on specific patient populations.

“I think that really any GPP patient stands to benefit,” Chovatiya explained. “And I really want to make a point that we often think about generalized pustular psoriasis as this sort of 0 - 100 phenomenon, that all the patients with GPP are super severe and covered from head to toe, and postural and erythema are hospitalized on the brink of death. But really what gets lost in this discussion is that there is a whole host of patients that have more moderate amounts of disease that maybe is in limited body surface areas and comes and goes.:

He added that there may be, generally speaking, more to deal with here.

“But we often don't think about these patients,” Chovatiya said. “And I think that once you've made the diagnosis of GPP, whether you have a few percentage body surface area, whether its the entirety of your body surface area, whether you have it on certain surfaces versus other surfaces on your body, whether it has a lot of flares and not many flares. GPP is GPP. So we really should be using these statements to guide us to making sure our patients can get on the right therapy to really help prevent those flares and treat those flags.”

Chovatiya also addressed future developments in the dermatology space for GPP management.

“I think one of the big ones is going to be so I mentioned spesolimab, which is a monoclonal antibody that's currently in infusion form that's used to treat flares at the onset of GPP. I think that probably some of the advancements for that we're going to see is the use of this medication to actually prevent further flares being used as a chronic therapy and actually ended up not in an IV form but actually a subcutaneous dose form.”

For any additional information from Chovatiya, view his full interview segment posted above.

The quotes featured in this summary were edited for clarity.