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...]
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...]
How Am I Doing? Assessing Your PAH.
Perhaps the most common question that I get asked by my patients is “How am I doing”. This is both a simple and a complicated question. Over the past 20 years we have developed many tools to assess how a patient with PAH is doing. We have a long list of tests that we can perform from heart catheterization, echocardiography, blood tests, walk tests and we are continually … [Read more...]
Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Research
FDA Approval Process for PAH Drugs The past decade has seen many new drugs approved to treat PAH. The development of a new drug is a long and expensive process. Candidate new drugs are identified and then enter the clinical research pathway. Before a medication is ever tested in humans, the medication is tested in a variety of laboratory settings and then in animal models. … [Read more...]
