The RheumNow Week in Review - June 16 2017 Save

This is the RheumNow week review, the special EULAR 2017 edition. I'm doctor Jack Cush, executive editor of rheumnow.com. And this week at EULAR, a lot of interesting things, a really interesting week, a lot of good stuff. The first two days have been covered on RheumNow. The next two days will be covered next week on Monday and Tuesday.

So far, having gone through three days of me with one more left, there's a few themes that have come out in my mind. Probably at the top of the list is psoriatic arthritis and SPA. A lot going on. A lot of extension studies to what's been done before. TOFA, TNF inhibitors, secukinumab, ixekizumab, and even abatacin have all looked good in twenty four, fifty two, even two year studies.

But sort of the subtext is that there's news about enthesitis. There's a sort of focus on enthesitis. There are studies with ustekinumab and enthesitis. There's studies with enthesitis not doing so well with certain drugs, specifically execizumab. So a lot of the other studies have shown emphesitis, doctolitis, ACR twenty, everything looks good.

But emphesitis is sort of not quite what it should be, at least with execizumab. And then in the case of ustekinumab, we're doing an emphesitis specific study, it looked really, really good. I think one of the problems though is the measures that's used for emphyseidus. It's not quite as exact as the ACR 20, but this still is an important thing, and this is something that's gonna play out over time. The other big message in psoriatic arthritis is or is really the psoriasis.

How good are these drugs in skin disease? So while the TNF inhibitors work very well, tofacitinib works well at high doses and works well with a lot of time. So it doesn't look good at three months, but maybe at six and twelve months, it looks good. Unfortunately, abatacept looks great in the joints, but doesn't seem to get much bang for its buck in the skin. So a lot going on.

The cancer is another another interesting thing that's out there. There's been a few studies all continuing to reaffirm that whether it's a TNF inhibitor, a a a study done by Rachau and actually presented by Carl Turson from showed that the artist database looking at recurrence of cancer, there was no recurrence of solid tumors when you expose people to TNF inhibitors. And there's another interesting study also from the artist database looking at all biologics, know, tocilizumab, abatastif, rituximab, tNF inhibitors, showing again also no increase in cancer with exposure to that. A lot of long term extension studies, local score and look good after four weeks. That's the the cyclosporine like drug being used for lupus nephritis.

And lastly, a very interesting study with belimumab and Rituxan being given to patients with lupus. Real sick lupus, you know, sleep eye scores of 18, and they gave them two doses of rituximab and followed up with belinumab. The results looked really good. Now it's a pilot study, but they were mainly looking to see if the drug would affect antibody levels and nettosis, and it did. In addition to that, the patients got better.

They lose less steroids, and many of them were able to stop their mycophenolate. So exciting new news. Go to the website. See what's going on at ULAR. We'll see you next week at rheumnow.com.