Transcript
Skin Minute - Soung_v3 - Transcript
Dr. Jennifer Song. I'm a board-certified dermatologist and clinical researcher in Santa Ana, California. So psoriasis has been the disease or skin condition that I've been passionate about, now for 20 years. So what I love about the recent FDA approval of roflumilast 0.3%, also known as Zeryng cream, is for the age group as young as two years old now.
It's the first steroid-free once-daily topical for plaque psoriasis for this age group, two to five. And what makes this so meaningful is we've been looking for a highly effective steroid-free topical for these kids. And it's so important, a chronic skin disease like psoriasis, where although we don't have a cure for the skin condition, we have so many great ways of managing it for adolescent and adult populations, but not something for this age group as young as two to five.
You can imagine that parents are very concerned about using steroids for a chronic skin condition. I'm a mom of three, so that'sprobably my biggest conflict of interest, is I totally understand that you're balancing, one, safety in using a steroid for a skin condition that comes and goes. When you use the topical, it goes away, but if you stop using it, often it comes back.
So you're in that dilemma of how do you keep it away without damaging the skin, on top of the fact that our kids are so young, so their, I like to say body surface to volume ratio means I'm worried that if there's too much steroid at a young age, that I'm going to get some growth suppression or other chronic side effects.
So what ends up happening for many years is that pediatricians just keep these patients, because they tell parents, "Well, you know what? Probably not worth it to treat," or, "We don't want to use too many, too much steroids." So what happens is I only end up seeing patients when they have much more severe disease or more consequences of the disease.
For example, if it's affecting a high-impact area like the face or a very visible area where other kids start to notice, "Hey, what's going on in your skin?" So by that point, you're already starting to have that impact on quality of life, ranging from maybe limiting the activities they want to do at that age, or that psychosocial kind of component where they're embarrassed, they're not socializing as much because at that age, kids are very transparent, so they're going to be very honest if they see something that looks different.
So I believe that in that age, you actually have a much greater opportunity to have an impact on this child's life to be able to live their best life, in fact, even maybe change their trajectory because those formative years are so critical in shaping their future path. SoI'm a big proponent of treating earlier, and that's what makes roflumilast 0.3%, so amazing, is that it's steroid-free.
There's no limit on how long you're going to use it, and it's meant to be used once daily. It's an elegant formulation, not messy. So you put a little bit on. It almost feels lotion-like to me. They also spent a lot of time and technology in making it actually moisturizing too. So also the vehicle itself helps repair the skin barrier.
So not only a really safe mechanism of action by targeting PDE4, which allows you to use it daily without restriction on duration of time, as well as a highly effective medication that can be used anywhere on the body in sensitive skin areas, as well as those thicker plaques, perhaps on the elbows and knees where kids are just on the playground, on the run all the time.
And so they often get psoriasis in areas that have more trauma. As a physician researcher who's been doing trials for twenty years now, I'mreally selective about the studies that I participate in because remember, for kids, we still have to do blood draws even though this is a topical study.
But so valuable that Arcutis took the time to prove the safety of the medication as well as the pharmacodynamics and efficacy of the topical. So again, it really speaks to the investment that the company has into this mechanism of action.
