VIDEO: Research should focus on maintenance, long-term management of vasculitis

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I do think that a lot of the research that is going on now in different types of vasculitis is certainly directed at some of the big key core questions, which is like, how do we get people very quickly from disease onset into remission or low disease activity? One of the big things that I would like to see more companies take up is this question of maintenance, and I think that there's a lot of interest in what do we do when people first have disease and what do we do when people have a flare of disease? And those are certainly the easiest things to study in terms of clinical trial design.

Maintenance is a much harder thing to study. They require longer trials, the endpoints are different, and I think they pose greater challenges to clinical trial designers. However, I do think that figuring out how we maintain remission in the long term is a big unanswered question in a lot of our types of vasculitis. How long should people be on therapy? Like after what period of time of remission is it safe to start withdrawing therapy? You know, should we be converting to other types of therapy as patients go along? I think that there’s a lot of things that we do based on like expert opinion right now in terms of like the long-term management of vasculitis patients. But I do think that there could be more work in this area of maintenance in particular.