What is the mechanism of action of baricitinib?
Featuring Michael Cameron, MD |
Assistant Professor
Mount Sinai Ichan School of Medicine
New York, NY
So like a lot of our inflammatory skin diseases, there's a variety of cytokines that play a really important role in targeting the hair follicle as in auto antigen and then causing inflammation around the hair follicle. And so these cytokines depend on the JAK-STAT pathway to transmit their message to the nucleus. And so baricitinib is a small molecule, no different than aspirin or tylenol, and so it diffuses through the cell membrane of these inflammatory cells and blocks signaling of these inflammatory cytokines and thereby does not allow those cytokines to send their message to the nucleus. And so it halts all of that pro inflammatory pathways.