NIH awards Mount Sinai $6.6 million to research dupilumab as pediatric alopecia treatment

Key takeaways:

• Emma Guttman-Yassky, MD, PhD, has received a $6.6 million NIH grant to investigate dupilumab treatment in pediatric alopecia.
• The collaborative effort will include 76 children and will last 112 weeks.

The NIH has awarded Emma Guttman-Yassky, MD, PhD, a $6.6 million grant to investigate dupilumab as a treatment for children with alopecia areata, Mount Sinai announced in a press release.

“There is a huge unmet need still in alopecia areata (AA) for targeted treatments, but the one population that the need is much bigger for than anyone else is children,” Emma Guttman-Yassky MD, PhD, the Waldman Professor and System Chair of the Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Healio.

The NIH awards its 5-year grant to a cause that will foster innovation and excellence in scientific inquiry. In a collaborative effort funded by the NIH grant and led by Guttman-Yassky, researchers will investigate the safety, tolerability, efficacy and durability of response of subcutaneous dupilumab, a monoclonal antibody, in pediatric patients with extensive AA.

“Right now, we only have one drug approved for children ages 12 and up and it’s a [Janus kinase] inhibitor,” Guttman-Yassky, who is also a member of Healio Dermatology’s Peer Perspective Board, said. “JAK inhibitors need to be given all the time for life and the moment you stop using them, the disease will start to come back. So, we need safe treatments that can be used long-term, particularly in the pediatric population.”

In a clinical trial recently conducted by Guttman-Yassky, dupilumab induced significant hair regrowth in adult patients with severe AA. This promising finding has encouraged the researchers to look further into this treatment for children.

The grant-funded study will include 76 children, aged 6 to 17 years with alopecia affecting at least 50% of the scalp. Patients will be randomly assigned 2:1 to dupilumab or placebo for 48 weeks followed by another 48 weeks of open label dupilumab. The study will last a total of 112 weeks with the last 16 weeks being devoted to follow-up.

“We are super excited about this and really believe this will work very well,” Guttman-Yassky said. “This may open the door to a novel way to treat children with alopecia.”