Adults living with dermatomyositis now have a medicine approved specifically for their disease for the first time. The Food and Drug Administration approved Lisraya, known generically as brepocitinib, on August 27 as a once-daily 30 mg tablet for adults with a rare autoimmune condition that attacks the muscles and skin, causing progressive weakness and painful, itchy rashes.
The practical significance is what patients have been living without. For decades, treatment has meant chronic corticosteroids and drugs borrowed from other autoimmune conditions, none of them approved for dermatomyositis itself. That has left patients managing a debilitating disease with therapies never studied primarily for it, and often carrying the cumulative burden of long-term steroid use.
