John Tesser, MD: I want to wrap up with a comment on the unmet needs and future directions in terms of treating patients with psoriatic arthritis and disease. If you look at all the studies that have won approval for drugs for this family of diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, you’ll see that although 70% optimistically of patients may get 20% better with their psoriatic arthritis, in fact, less than 50% get 50% better. If you think about that, you realize a ton of patients are not getting a meaningful clinical response on any particular drug that has been approved on the population of patients who’ve been studied.

One way to counter that and what we’ve succeeded in, to a degree, is to find new and approved drugs for the disease. As I mentioned, in the last handful of years, we’ve had many more drugs available for our patients, but we need more. We need more therapies—different therapies, not copycat mechanism-of-action therapies to treat the diseases that we see—for psoriatic arthritis.

The other aspect I’d like to point out is that although pain and fatigue from the inflammation are primary outcomes of the disease itself, even when we succeed in controlling the inflammation to the degree that we can measure it and understand it, we still have a lot of patients who have pain and fatigue. We’re stymied by this because we’re not sure why that’s happening, the mechanisms of it, and how best to treat them. This is an ongoing investigation and an ongoing understanding that’s furthering the march to better understanding in both therapies and treatments of our patients with psoriatic disease. Jen, and Nehad, do you have any comments to add before we wrap?

Nehad Soloman, MD: No, we’ve hit every point. We did a comprehensive job. Thank you for joining and moderating, John, and for all your insightful thoughts, Jennifer.

Jennifer Simpson, DNP: I don’t have anything to add either. We touched on quite a bit.

John Tesser, MD: Thank you 2. I appreciate all of us getting together and having this very genial, collegial, and friendly interaction. Hopefully this will be very informative for the audience. Thank you for watching this HCPLive® Peer Exchange. If you enjoyed the content, please subscribe to our e-newsletters to receive upcoming Peer Exchanges and other great content right in your inbox.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.