A small study conducted by researchers at St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin suggests that Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 semaglutide could treat a common and chronic skin condition called hidradenitis suppurativa.
The study, published Wednesday at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology’s annual meeting in Amsterdam, examined data from June 2020 to March 2023 in 30 obese patients with HS who started taking semaglutide.
It found that those patients had fewer flare-ups of the disease than they did before treatment, with the frequency of flare-ups dropping from an average of once every 8.5 weeks to once every 12 weeks. Patients also saw other well-known benefits of the drug, including weight loss and improved blood sugar levels.
“The results are highly encouraging and could represent a major breakthrough in HS treatment,” the study’s lead researcher Daniel Lyons said in a statement. “To build on this progress, larger randomized controlled trials are necessary to validate these findings.”
Semaglutide is marketed as Wegovy for weight loss and Ozempic for diabetes, and it has already shown potential benefits in a wide range of diseases like heart failure and obesity.
More news out of EADV:
- Acelyrin also dropped HS data on Wednesday from a 258-patient Phase 3 study of its IL-17A inhibitor, called izokibep. The trial met the primary endpoint of a 75% clinical response at week 12, with 33% of patients receiving Acelyrin’s drug seeing that level of response versus 21% on placebo. Similarly, 25% of patients on izokibep saw a 90% clinical response compared to 8% on placebo. The abstract said the drug was well-tolerated with no new safety signals.
- AbbVie also touted skin disease data for its rheumatoid arthritis drug Rinvoq in patients with moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis in a post-hoc analysis. The analysis, which included data from the Measure Up 1 and Measure Up 2 Phase 3 studies, found that a higher proportion of patients taking either 15 mg or 30 mg of Rinvoq had near complete skin clearance in the head and neck region and minimal disease activity, which includes skin clearance and little to no itch, compared to placebo.