One more option is on the way for patients with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory disease that affects the digestive system causing diarrhea, pain, weight loss and, in the most serious cases, taking patients to the operating room. Indeed, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has just released a positive opinion for the approval of upadacitinib, an oral drug reserved for the treatment of those patients who are intolerant or do not respond to traditional therapies or biological therapies.
Upadacitinib is a drug already approved for the treatment of psoriasis, some rheumatological diseases and ulcerative colitis. And the studies conducted to understand its effectiveness against another inflammatory disease, such as Crohn’s, have shown that the medicine manages to contain the symptoms, reducing the frequency of discharges and abdominal pain, and reducing lesions affecting the digestive tract , to the point of arriving in some cases at a real healing of the mucosa.
Upadacitinib manages to do this thanks to a new mechanism of action, at least for Crohn’s disease: it is in fact the first Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor to be used in the disease. This category of drugs works by blocking the action of certain enzymes involved in inflammation. Also in terms of safety – Jak inhibitors are drugs with particular criticalities, especially for some categories of patients, such as those with cardiovascular risk – no particular signals have been reported, with adverse events already observed for the drug and similar among patients on treatment and those who received the placebo.
Crohn’s disease, in addition to intestinal disorders, can cause a number of systemic symptoms, with social and emotional repercussions. “Upadacitinib could be a promising therapeutic option for adult patients who, despite treatment with conventional or biological therapies, continue to have moderately to severely active disease – underlined Giovanni Monteleone, director of the UOC Gastroenterology of the Tor Vergata Polyclinic in Rome – Treatment options that have important goals, such as clinical remission and improvement of lesions on endoscopic examinations, can make a difference in quality of life”.