Looking beyond appearances

Psoriasis patients have told FDA they need relief from more symptoms than the visible skin lesions that often serve as the primary endpoint of registrational trials. The need is not lost on drug developers, which are developing instruments to measure those symptoms and are considering strategies to make enrolling in trials more palatable when patients may be required to discontinue current treatments to participate.

The hallmarks of psoriasis are the thick patches of inflamed or scaly skin caused by excessive proliferation of skin cells. The disease is detrimental to quality of life both physically and emotionally, and is associated with co-morbidities including psoriatic arthritis, depression, cardiovascular disease and diabetes...