Alumis shoots up as its Sotyktu rival aces psoriasis trials
Dr Jörn Drappa, Alumis' chief medical officer.
Alumis is preparing to file its oral TYK2 inhibitor envudeucitinib as a treatment for psoriasis later this year, after a pair of positive phase 3 trials.
The South San Francisco biotech said envudeucitinib (formerly ESK-001) delivered "leading skin clearance" in the phase 3 ONWARD1 and ONWARD2 trials, meeting all primary and secondary endpoints with high statistical significance in patients with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis.
The headline result is that around two-thirds (65%) of patients taking the drug achieved 90% or better skin clearance (a PASI 90 response) at week 24, while 40% of them had a complete response (PASI 100).
If approved, the drug would be a direct competitor to Bristol Myers Squibb's first-to-market oral TYK2 drug Sotyktu (deucravacitinib), which has been on the market since 2022 and made $206 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, a 26% increase on the same period of 2024.
Trying to make comparisons between different clinical trials is fraught with difficulties, but in the POETYK PSO-1 and POETYK PSO-2 studies, Sotyktu achieved PASI 90 in around 40% of patients and PASI 100 in around 15% at 24 weeks.
That efficacy level, which falls short of injectable biologics for psoriasis such as Novartis' Cosentyx (secukinumab) and AbbVie's Skyrizi (risankizumab), has been put forward as one reason Sotyktu has not been growing at the rate expected, given that BMS was predicting at launch that Sotyktu could become a $4 billion-a-year product.
Both drugs also showed in their phase 3 trials that they were superior to Amgen's oral PDE4 inhibitor Otezla (apremilast), which leads the category among oral therapies for psoriasis, helped by an expansion of its label to include milder cases, and made more than $1.6 billion in the first three quarters of last year.
Alumis shares rocketed up nearly 82% on the back of the data, which also pointed to a clean safety and tolerability profile for envudeucitinib.
"We believe envudeucitinib demonstrates the full promise of TYK2 inhibition. By maximally inhibiting TYK2, envudeucitinib blocks both IL‑23 and IL‑17 to deliver comprehensive disease control," said Dr Jörn Drappa, Alumis' chief medical officer.
"In phase 3, this translated into rapid onset of action, high rates of skin clearance, and meaningful symptom improvements that rank among the strongest reported for an oral therapy."
Alumis is also developing envudeucitinib in phase 2b as a potential treatment for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), with results due in the third quarter of 2026.
