So, graft-versus-host disease is one of the principle complications of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, where a recipient having received a bone marrow transplant suffers from an immunologic injury from their donor’s cells. Historically, this treatment has been treated with systemic corticosteroids, a treatment which has significant morbidity. What the trial that I presented today aims to do is to replace systemic corticosteroids with a JAK1 inhibitor, itacitinib...
So, graft-versus-host disease is one of the principle complications of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, where a recipient having received a bone marrow transplant suffers from an immunologic injury from their donor’s cells. Historically, this treatment has been treated with systemic corticosteroids, a treatment which has significant morbidity. What the trial that I presented today aims to do is to replace systemic corticosteroids with a JAK1 inhibitor, itacitinib. This is true, in this study anyway, for a subset of patients, those who are Minnesota standard risk clinical criteria for low risk GvHD and Ann Arbor 1 GvHD, a biomarker risk classification scheme, so both clinical and biomarker risk scores together. So itacitinib was as effective as systemic corticosteroids for the treatment of low-risk GvHD, even in subsets of patients with extensive skin GvHD or lower GI GvHD, which is a big finding. In addition to that, itacitinib treated patients were less likely to experience significant infectious morbidity than patients receiving systemic corticosteroids, so itacitinib is both effective and safer than the status quo.
