VIDEO: JAK inhibitors may enable management of multiple autoimmune diseases with less medication

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What is really relevant to us as rheumatologists is we're always trying to think about how do we manage multiple comorbidities with less medication? And so we now have official FDA approval for ulcerative colitis for both tofacitinib [Xeljanz, Pfizer]and Upadacitinib [Rinvoq, AbbVie]. So often we manage patients who have inflammatory bowel disease related joint problems or arthritis. So being able to pick medications and avoid potentially using multiple strong immunosuppressants is really exciting.

So I mean, I think when you think about autoimmune disease, we know that there's about a quarter of people who have autoimmune disease that will have another autoimmune disease. So if there's a way we can manage multiple autoimmune diseases with one medication, that would be really exciting.

What's really interesting is that we see already that metabolic disease and a lot of conditions that involve inflammation may have some benefit to being treated by medications that are controlling inflammation. And it may just not be as a direct effect that we see with rheumatoid arthritis or IBD, but we are seeing that there may be a real role for JAK inhibitors in treating metabolic syndrome specifically because we're really seeing that the JAK-STAT pathway does have some crosstalk with the insulin signaling pathway. And so potentially impacting metabolic syndrome and glucose control would be exciting pathway for JAK inhibitors.