Jessica Ailani, MD: Long-Term Safety and Efficacy of Ubrogepant in Acute Migraine

"My patients want to know, 'if I take a medicine and it works, is it going to keep working or is it going to give up on me in a year?’ so this data is a really important set of information to have for clinicians to know that they can feel confident when prescribing an acute treatment."

With the recent approval of a number of highly effective preventive medications for patients with migraine, whether chronic or episodic, the ability of clinicians to treat these individuals has become much easier. However, many challenges persist, and a number of treatments gaps still exist.

One of the topics of conversation at the 2019 American Headache Society Annual Meeting, July 11-14, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a major area of unmet need in headache medicine: acute migraine treatments. Although new preventives can greatly reduce the number of migraines patients have, they still have a need for acute therapies for the attacks that they do experience. Data have shown that many patients don't have an adequate response to these therapies and/or experience adverse effects, with adherence also remaining an issue.

Jessica Ailani, MD, director, MedStar Georgetown Headache Center, and associate professor, neurology, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, is one of the migraine specialists involved in clinical trials of several potential new agents for this purpose. One of these, ubrogepant, has shown particularly exciting data in this area, and in March, a new drug application for the oral calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor antagonist was accepted for review by the FDA.

To find out more about ubrogepant’s long-term safety and efficacy, NeurologyLive^® sat with Ailani at the AHS meeting to discuss some of the study data that she and her colleagues presented.

For more coverage of AHS 2019, click here.

REFERENCE

Ailani J. Long-term Safety Evaluation of Ubrogepant for the Acute Treatment of Migraine Attacks. Presented at: 2019 American Headache Society Annual Meeting. July 11-14, 2019; Philadelphia, PA. Poster P109.