VIDEO: Unmet needs in ulcerative colitis

Editor’s note: Below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I think there's lots of areas of unmet needs. I think this is what is certainly keeping us all very engaged and adamant about, where of course we want to have a cure for inflammatory bowel disease as a whole. And that includes those patients who suffer with ulcerative colitis. But at the end of the day, as we're progressing into having an expanding medicine cabinet and having different therapeutic and treatment options, I think unmet needs consistently falls under the, can we find a cure? But until then, and while we're working towards a cure, can we better be able to predict who responds to which treatment? Certainly it's exciting to have an expanding medicine cabinet, but we talked about how do we position therapies and how do we choose which drug is appropriate for which patient? So, are there ways that we can find or have a better predictor of this patient and which patient is more likely to respond to this class of medications? Being able to have that in advance, certainly helps our patients, improves quality of life, the patient reported outcomes, and certainly disease outcomes altogether. If we find the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. And so, timing is essential. And if we have a better understanding of predictors, then we could be able to initiate the right therapy for each respective patient. Also with the expanding medicine cabinet, far too often we're asked the simple question, which I think is very appropriate, which is well, is one drug better, one medication better than another? And so having additional studies as comparative efficacy studies to help us evaluate is one drug, one medication more superior to another medication for the treatment of ulcerative colitis and there's studies such as these comparisons that are coming and have already been available and more to come, which is certainly very good to see. And we absolutely need that.

And then lastly, I think it's certainly, it's hard to predict which of our patients who suffer from ulcerative colitis will have certainly a progression of their disease to pancolitis, but more so that risk of acute severe ulcerative colitis. And these patients are the ones who are requiring an urgent hospitalization. These are the patients who probably are at a very high risk of a colectomy. So, finding the appropriate therapy for the hospitalized patient with high inflammatory burden who perhaps has not responded to other medications and now are hospitalized receiving IV corticosteroids and we're trying to determine, well, what's next? I think that absolutely remains an unmet need for our management and care for patients with ulcerative colitis. And so certainly being able to determine the appropriateness of which treatment we can consider and can we have more options available than the one biologic that we currently may consider, that is certainly of interest for many of our patients and for many of us in the community and in all organizations where we're trying to best care for all of our patients.