Bruce Sands, MD, MS: Guselkumab Data Continues to Impress at ACG

New data presented during the 2022 American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Annual Meeting in Charlotte show guselkumab (TREMFYA) results in an 80% clinical response rate for patients with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis.

The data come from the QUSAR Induction study and was presented by Bruce E. Sands, MD, MS, Chief of the Dr. Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Dr. Burrill B. Crohn Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The study included patients who were not achieving clinical response at week 12 who switched to subcutaneous guselkumab 200 mg.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Sand discussed the positive results and talked about how there are several new and exciting drugs soon to be on the market that could transform care for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Guselkumab is an interleukin-23 inhibitor, which is the same pathway as risankizumab, a recently approved treatment for patients with Crohn's disease.

Sands said the advent of IL-23 treatments could eventually result in more personalized treatments for patients with IBD, but right now there are more biomarkers for non-response than there are for response.

“We’d love for the field to move to a precision medicine approach,” Sands said. “We’d love to see that; we just don’t have the markers yet.”