Translating Trial Success to Daily Life: Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, MSCI

Chronic hand eczema (CHE) imposes extreme occupational, psychological, and social impacts on patients, stemming from signs and symptoms of the disease that are both visible and not so obvious. Delgocitinib (Anzupgo; LEO Pharma), a new steroid-free treatment option for patients who have CHE of moderate to severe severity, was approved on July 23 for moderate to severe disease based on results from the DELTA 1 (NCT04871711) and DELTA 2 (NCT04872101) clinical trials.

In this conversation with Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, MSCI, associate professor at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science Chicago Medical School, and founder and director of the Center for Medical Dermatology and Immunology Research in Chicago, Illinois, he explains how addressing the most burdensome components of CHE can improve overall health and lead to significantly better outcomes in patients’ day-to-day life.

Revisit part 1 of this interview, where he discusses the significance of a new nonsteroidal treatment for CHE.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How might the DELTA 1 and 2 trial outcomes translate into tangible real-world improvements in patient quality of life?

In the case of chronic hand eczema, in addition to these signs that you can see, like erythema or redness, scaling, cracking, bleeding, even fissures or deep cuts, those alone can create a great burden for our patients, but the symptoms of their disease are also a big problem. Skin pain is huge. Individuals oftentimes feel a lot of pain associated with their disease. Itch is another important part as well. Our trials have really been designed now in this new age of chronic hand eczema to be able to assess all those different individual elements and particularly how they impact patients’ quality of life.

What we found is that as patients improve the signs and symptoms of their disease, especially as we saw in the DELTA studies, their overall quality of life and daily functioning scores increased as well. Put in another way, if you can actually address the most burdensome components of chronic hand eczema, which would include not only the signs of disease, but the symptoms, you can get people back to a point where their actual productivity and their ability to do their day-to-day work is really reversed from where they used to be as well.

I think that, in general, one of the power of trial instruments that may not get used much in the real world, but are measured very rigorously in the study setting, is that they can show, without shadow of a doubt, that as you improve individuals’ overall health, they're going to overall do a lot better in terms of their day-to-day life.