Bimekizumab Improves Pain, Fatigue in Patients With Active PsA

Interleukin-17 inhibition with bimekizumab has previously demonstrated improvements in patient-reported symptoms for up to 3 years in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) in a phase IIb study.

A study presented at this year’s American College of Rheumatology (ACR) annual meeting pooled data from two phase III trials to assess the impact of bimekizumab on fatigue and pain in patients with active PsA who were naive to biologic disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) or had an inadequate response to one or two tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, M. Elaine Husni, MD, MPH, vice chair of rheumatology and director of the Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Center of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, discusses the new data.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

We all know that bimekizumab has been successful in treating the signs and symptoms of psoriatic arthritis, but we now have more data looking at pain and fatigue, which is also really important for patients that are living with psoriatic arthritis.

So we looked at both pooled and individual results looking at patients with active psoriatic arthritis that’s treated with bimekizumab and looking to see at week 16 if there was any improvement in the FACIT-Fatigue [Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue Scale] or the patient assessment of pain. So overall we found that 96.5% of patients that were randomized to bimekizumab or to placebo at week 16 had generally comparable baseline characteristics. And if you look at Figure 2 for our study, we show that a higher proportion of patients that were treated with bimekizumab had greater improvement in the patient assessment of arthritis pain with improvements of 30%, 50%, and 70% from baseline compared to placebo. So we also looked at the FACIT MCID [minimal clinically important difference], and we noticed that the patients treated with bimekizumab also had a higher mean FACIT-Fatigue compared to placebo.

Another interesting point, if you look at Figures 2 and 3, we also looked at the onset of bimekizumab in terms of health-related quality of life, and we noticed that as early as week 4, that we saw some improvement between the two groups of bimekizumab treated versus placebo. And I think that’s really interesting that we were able to see the magnitude of response in what we considered relatively early. We usually do assess treatment out to about 12 weeks, but it’s interesting that we saw some initial improvement as early as week 4.

So in conclusion, it’s pretty exciting that we are able to look at additional parameters to not just signs and symptoms of psoriatic arthritis, but also looking at really important health-related quality-of-life issues such as pain and fatigue scores.