CelltrionHealthcare

3. The IBD treatment landscape: Today & Tomorrow

We don’t have one drug that is about to cure IBD. We know that. So we have to improve other things. We have to improve patient preferences, patient satisfaction. I mean, we have, I would say sometimes ignored or I think we have underestimated these aspects in the field of IBD during many years because we were so happy to see the efficacy of biologics that we were thinking that this is minor point. This is not a minor point. If you want to improve satisfaction, when you improve satisfaction, what is with higher consequence is that the patient will be happy, [they] will take the drug, you will increase adherence, and then at the end you will reduce the healthcare system cost.

What we like is that people can stay at home and be treated and monitored the same. So the reasons why we do more and more now. Some stool test at home such as fecal calprotectin but also people would like to get the treatment at home and this is something that now we are discussing more and more because, in the past, I mean when we had for instance only IV infusions for the first treatment two decades ago, it means that people had to come to the hospital and it was also a huge impact on their social and professional lives. So they would like to be at home, monitored at home, and treated at home.

My hopes for future of IBD is just that we can get more drugs, more options, different route of administration, different MoA (mode of action) increasing, breaking the therapeutic ceiling. I think we need a portfolio because molecular precision medicine is still in its infancy and it's still difficult. But I'm a strong believer in clinical precision medicine. It means that every patient should get the right drug that [they] loves. If you want SC (subcutaneous), [they] should be able to have SC. So I think that now with so many options, everything that has been improved from efficacy, safety, tolerability, device and so on, every IBD patient will find this drug and will be happy.