Highlights

The bulk of my mild-to-moderate [psoriasis patients are on] generic topical steroids and I don’t think Otezla’s going to change that. If I give somebody mild-to-moderate psoriasis Otezla, I’m still going to give them the same topical steroids I’m giving them now and so it’s not going to have a big impact on other treatments. But, if it gets approval for mild I don’t really like that they’ve been spending tens of thousands of dollars a year for treatment of mild disease, but I guess that’s not my job to decide. If a patient has mild disease and Otezla’s approved for mild, I’ll prescribe it for them and then I’ll rely on the insurance side whether or not they want to pay for it.

I believe that these new topicals, like roflumilast, the one that just approved – the Opzelura and the tapinarof are going to be like Eucrisa. They’re going to have a whole lot of experts telling the country ‘these are great drugs, we really need these new non-steroidal topicals because we don’t like using steroids, they don’t work, we have people who fail them. Give us an effective one that’s non-steroidal without the black box warning Protopic has’, and they’ll be all excited about it and then it’ll hit the market and be just like Eucrisa. I love the idea of a non-steroidal topical but unless it solves the reason patients don’t get better with their topical steroid, which is that they don’t use their topical steroid, I just don’t see how it would be effective on the market.