The Current Challenges of Psoriasis Prescribing

Final thoughts?

Brad Glick, DO, FAAD: It's a very challenging time right now. We're fielding questions about vaccines when patients are on biologic therapies, it may be a little bit of away from this discussion today. But I think it's really important that we size up each patient individually, that we look at their medication profile so that we look at their background comorbidities.

It's not unreasonable to select biologic therapy for patients, even in the midst of a pandemic, because, you know, the guidelines that we have in general is that when patients have an infection, they would never inject, we would never start them on a systemic biologic therapy if they had an active infection, including the COVID-19 virus. Ironically, we do know that when patients are fairly sick with COVID-19, and those that become critically ill, they develop this cytokine storm, and there are some questions as to whether maybe even being on biologics could potentially be beneficial. And there are agents in study right now for this as well. Those studies continue.

And some of the other systemic therapies that are new in our world like JAK inhibitors are being studied as their potential role for treating patients with COVID-19. So it's a very unusual time, but I think it's a very important time for our patients who have severe psoriatic disease, including skin and joint disease, and they can have successful responses from some of these highly targeted biologic therapies that we have in our toolbox. Thanks so much.