A new drug is poised to enter the PAH market and offers great promise for patients. This new drug works in a completely different way from all the currently approved medications. Sotatercept is an injection (shot) that is given subcutaneously (under the skin) every 3 weeks. The medication acts by blocking activin. In PAH there are good signals and bad signals within the blood … [Read more...]
Why Abortion Matters to PAH Patients
Across America a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is under threat. Without diving into politics or religion I want to impress on the PAH community why this may spell disaster for our PAH patients. The Supreme Court is on the verge of reversing half a century of legal precedent that has protected a woman’s right to choose. At the same time, several states have … [Read more...]
Aerovate and Inhaled Imatinib
Imatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that has been on the market for more than 20 years to treat a type of leukemia. It acts by turning off tyrosine kinases. You can think of tyrosine kinases as critical switches in cells that turn on and off critical pathways. Too much of an “on” signal leads to dysregulated cell proliferation and growth—such as seen … [Read more...]
Sotatercept for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
For the past 30 years, all our pulmonary arterial hypertension medications were described as vasodilators: First prostanoids (epoprostenol), then endothelin receptor antagonists (bosentan, ambrisentan, macitentan) and PDE5 inhibitors (sildenafil and tadalafil). These medications work through different mechanism but all lead to the vasodilation or … [Read more...]
Back in Action
Please forgive the hiatus in posting new content. When I am not caring for pulmonary hypertension and pulmonary fibrosis patients I am also an intensive care unit doctor and have been inundated caring for many thousands of patients with severe COVID. My team and I have cared for well over 8,000 patients with severe COVID during the past two years. Over the past year it has … [Read more...]
