This drug may help selected lupus sufferers but it will not be much help to most sufferers. I congratulate the individuals who developed and brought this drug to market. Lupus is a difficult disease that has defied development of new treatments. Hopefully, this drug is just the beginning of new drugs and treatments.
It is targeted primarily at SLE, true, and not even all of those patients will benefit. But from what I’ve seen of long-term continuation studies, for the patients in whom it works, it WORKS, reducing flare activity pretty close to zero.
There are also other auto-immune indications that this could potentially be used for; studies for those indications are either underway or going to launch soon. It’ll be a lot easier to get approvals for other indications than it was to get original approval, and I imagine there’ll be off-label use as well.