New Medications in clinical trials or just completing trials

General
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I've been looking to see what new medications might be in clinical trials for PsA. You can find the clinical trials at http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=psoriatic+arthritis ... or try other search terms. Then if you look for completed studies, if you google around enough, you can maybe find the results of the trial. I did a little work so on one medicine, secukinumab (AIN 457). The suffix "mab" means its an anti-body, But this an TNF-Alpha antibody. It goes after interleukin which means it may be effective where the TNF fighters aren't. Also it might have very different side effects.

I still haven't figured out exactly what ACR20, ACR50 and ARC70 mean except that even ACR20 is better than nothing (I think) and higher is better. 89% of participants on the receiving secukinumab for 16 weeks at ACR20 or better compared to 46% for placebo. most participants were already on MTX. ACR 50 had 27% versus 15% for placebo and ACR70 had 8% versus 0% for placebo.

The Euler response rate which is maybe more intuitive had for the drug: no response 31%, Moderate response 31%, Good response 31%. The placebo was 62%, 19% and 19% respectively.

The data from that study is at: http://knol.google.com/k/kyle-tang/ain457-secukinumab/2tte8pje5bjpa/1#

There's another article at http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/06/novartis-secukinumab-idUSLDE6950KA20101006

I think secukinumab shows great promise mainly because it's a totally different medicine from Enbrel, Humira and Remicade. There are more trials open now.

There are several other medications listed in the trials and I don't have time to hunt them all down. Maybe others can also contribute to this thread.

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Hi Andrew, This actually isn't anywhere *near* to clinical trials, but it does seem to give a new approach to tackling rheumatoid and therefore (hopefully) psoriatic arthritis. Here's a link to the news release from Northwestern University - http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/09/bouncer-molecule-rheumatoid-arthritis.html

3

Thank you Andrea, that's a great article and very encouraging, although clearly something like that won't pay off for 10 years or more. Still, I plan to live a lot longer than 10 more years, so I'm encouraged. Since I made my post I found more information at the National Psoriasis Foundation. Every so often they do webcasts which can give cutting edge information on psoriasis... http://www.psoriasis.org/events/educational/webcasts

I only listened to one so far... by Dr. Lebwohl, but I thought it had tons of good information. It's discussing psoriasis, not PsA, but many of the medictions he mentioned are relevant for PsA. He talked about Secukinumab amoung several other treatments.

Andrea said:

Hi Andrew, This actually isn't anywhere *near* to clinical trials, but it does seem to give a new approach to tackling rheumatoid and therefore (hopefully) psoriatic arthritis. Here's a link to the news release from Northwestern University - http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/09/bouncer-mole...