Skyrizi (anti-IL23 antibody) Approved for Treatment of Crohn's Disease

[Scipio]

Another new option for treating Crohn's.

SKYRIZI® (risankizumab-rzaa) Receives FDA Approval as the First and Only Specific Interleukin-23 (IL-23) to Treat Moderately to Severely Active Crohn's Disease in Adults

- Third approved indication for SKYRIZI (risankizumab-rzaa) is supported by safety and efficacy data from two induction and one maintenance clinical trials...

www.prnewswire.com

It probably will be similar to Stelara, since Stelara also binds IL23 (and IL12 in addition). This is the first of several anti-IL23 antibodies currently in the Crohn's drug development pipeline.

 

[asadmom]

@Scipio, why targetting IL23? Have they identified IL23 to be the culprit? I am trying to understand the difference between Skyrizi and Humira.

 

[crohnsinct]

Different people have different drivers of disease. For some it is tnf and either suppressing tnf or making it more difficult for the tnf to wreck havoc works. But for some the Il’s or the JAK’s are the culprits to using those selective drugs works better for those people.

To complicate matters sometimes you start with tnf being the main driver but then when that is suppressed the other pathways kick it up a notch.

With precision medicine they are now trying to figure out a way to better identify which is driving each patients disease so they can choose the appropriate treatment and then even when they choose class of drug which one within the class as for example some target multiple IL’s or JAK’s but others just one.

 

[Scipio]

@Scipio, why targetting IL23? Have they identified IL23 to be the culprit? I am trying to understand the difference between Skyrizi and Humira.

They are targetting IL23 because if works. The big and growing success of Stelara as a Crohn's treatment has shown everyone the value of IL23 as a target for dampening the immune system.

The immune system is a complex web of various interacting proteins and cells. An over-active immune response as in IBD or autoimmunity can be dampened at several different points in the web by interrupting or weakening the binding between these proteins and their target cells - by binding up the protein with an antibody. This, in general, is how both Skyrizi and Humira work, but they are very different in that they bind up different proteins and thus dampen the immune system in different ways and to different degrees.

Which approach is better for any given case of Crohn's is a case of "it depends."