How effective are Janus kinase inhibitors?

Transcript

Andrew Rosenberg, DVM, DACVD: My name is Andrew Rosenberg, I am a veterinary dermatologist. I work with the Animal Dermatology Group as a clinical dermatologist in both the Wayne, New Jersey, and White Plains, New York, offices. I’m also the director of medical operations for the entire group, which is the largest dermatology group in the world. Additionally, I’m the president of the American College of Veterinary Dermatology, so I’m involved with the organization that board-certifies all veterinary dermatologists.

So it's a good question. And, you know, there's now 2 JAK inhibitors in veterinary medicine on the market. The first, of course, was Apoquel, and that was a Jak inhibitor. And now there's a new drug that was recently approved called Zenrelia, which is now the second JAK inhibitor on the market because Apoquel [has] been out for for considerably longer, there are some studies that that show that long-term, Apoquel is as effective as a medication like cyclosporine for long term, and it actually works more rapidly and Zenrelia works. You know, similar speed of onset as Apoquel does. So for long term treatment of allergies, or I should say allergy symptoms, because that's what these medications are treating, they're treating the symptoms of allergies, they're as effective as cyclosporine, and in a head to head study for Zenrelia versus Apoquel, well, they were, they were, you know, Zenrelia had a little bit better, even improvement in a periodic visual analog scale long term, when the study was extended long term, and it was shown to be non inferior than Apoquel. That was for a European study.

They're very effective at treating, you know, itch and associated with allergic dermatitis and inflammation associated with allergic dermatitis. Certainly another treatment of allergies is steroids, right? And we try to avoid long-term steroid use because of the side effects. So, but as far as your question is, how effective are they? Well, yeah, they're effective, and they work well. If we're talking about, kind of the flip side of this, which is the best long-term management of atopic dermatitis, as well as those JAK inhibitors work, I'm still recommending allergy testing and immunotherapy for long term control, and then I use those JAK inhibitors to really control the itch while I'm waiting for my immunotherapy to work, and then I can use them as needed if there are flare ups, despite being on immunotherapy, which inevitably there, there are, very commonly, some flare ups here and there.