When you have a crazily itchy dog or cat, everybody suffers. Patients in this state often keep you up at night and drive you crazy during the day dealing with the mad itch. At the base of wildly itchy animals is the immune system, which is working overtime, but malfunctioning. We have to insert a wink here because immune system dysregulation is entirely a manmade disease. More on that later. Enter the latest anti-inflammatory drug to make a splash in the veterinary market: Apoquel oclacitinib.
Apoquel is not for puppies. Or cats or people. WhiteCoat and Dr. Smarter than the marketers, smarter than Zoetis, and smarter than Dr. But guess who did the researchโฆ and for how long?
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A: Zoetis! I really, really wish I was making this up. Remember that wild and crazy immune system, spoken of earlier? In Part Two , I go into how that dermatologist really missed the larger point of what causes itch.
And how to work to truly prevent this maddening disease from wreaking havoc on your own animals. As you might guess, prevention in a real sense will trump giving a drug to try to control this painful disease. First, an important understanding. By its very nature, this is one complex system!
These small molecules are produced by a wide variety of cells, and they signal other cells to do something like come to the scene of infection, let loose their chemicals, take part in signaling others, dump antibodies, etc. More on inflammation in context here. A couple of words hidden in those names. Short for inhibit. So, this drug seeks to stop a piece of the inflammatory chemical cascade by interfering with certain enzymes called kinases, or JAK in the literature, which stops some cytokines from doing their thing.
