Emanuelle Bellaguarda, MD, on Immune-Mediated Events Related to Medications

In this video, Dr Emanuelle Bellaguarda recaps her presentation at the Advances in Inflammatory Bowel Disease regional meeting held on August 7, on Immune-Mediated Events Related to Medications.

Emanuelle Bellaguarda, MD, is an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Emanuelle Bellaguarda:  Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed Advances in IBD Regionals in August. I'm Dr Emanuelle Bellaguarda, assistant professor of medicine here at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.

During this conference, I presented on the topic of immune-mediated events related to medications. Specifically, I focused on the discussion of immune-mediated colitis. This immune-mediated adverse event is one of the most serious related to immunotherapy treatment and needs prompt diagnosis and treatment to avoid serious complications to our patients.

Immune-mediated therapies, such as anti-CTLA-4 inhibitors and anti-PD-1 as well as anti-PD-L1 inhibitors, have been widely used in different types of cancer in the clinical practice as well as in clinical trials.

I provided data endorsing the importance of performing early endoscopic evaluation to assess disease activity and plan medical therapy. Patients with high-risk features on colonoscopy will benefit from early escalation of therapy to biologics, such as infliximab and vedolizumab.

The key takeaway from this presentation is that you need to diagnose immune-mediated colitis early and treat it promptly to avoid progression of the disease and bowel perforation in our patients.

Thank you for attending Advances in IBD Regionals, and I hope you enjoyed my presentation in the meeting.