Philip J. Mease

New Capabilities

Active clinical researcher in psoriatic arthritis therapeutics

For most of the past decade, people with psoriatic arthritis who wanted a pill instead of an injection had one real option: Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, a class of oral drugs that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) slapped with its strongest safety warning in 2021 after a major trial linked them to higher rates of heart attacks, blood clots, cancer, and death. On March 6, the FDA reached its decision deadline on whether to approve the first oral drug from a different class entirely—Bristol Myers Squibb's Sotyktu (deucravacitinib), a selective tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) inhibitor—for adults with active psoriatic arthritis, a condition that causes painful joint inflammation in roughly 1.5 million Americans.

Updated Mar 6