VIDEO: Data on patient-reported outcomes needed in alopecia areata research

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As exciting as this time is, we now have two FDA-approved therapies, there’s another one coming, we need more therapies, right? Psoriasis has highlighted beautifully that a disease can support numerous therapeutics. And when we look at the data for JAK inhibitors, we see 40% to 50% of people succeeding, but that leaves half of the people who are not succeeding. And we might turn that 50% into 60% or 70% using concomitant therapies, but the point is there’s still unmet need. And so, we want to continue to advance therapeutics. We want to continue to investigate mechanism of disease so that we can do better and better with treatment. And also we want to understand better the impact of disease on people. And this might seem straightforward to those of us who see a lot of these patients. Certainly, for anybody who’s ever just stopped and listened to the story of somebody who’s been living with this for very long or listened to a parent describe what it’s like to watch their child lose all of their hair and try to pick up and go to school every day, we recognize the impact of the disease. But we have yet to find a good way to query patients, to ask them about what their experience is like, so that over the course of a clinical trial we can document the significance, the tremendous positive impact that treatment has. And I think that that data is really important because as health systems, as payers want to see data for the positive impact of otherwise expensive therapies, we need this kind of data. It’s not just enough to say, “I told you that it is a big deal.” We need to be able to show that, and so that’s another area of need.