Digital Pharma: First app for psoriasis launched

Janssen-Cilag UK has unveiled the first psoriasis iPhone app - a disease calculator for healthcare professionals treating the chronic skin condition.

It is the pharma company’s first foray into addressing the opportunity presented by Apple’s iPhone and was produced by Manchester-based agency Creative Lynx.

The CL PASI Calculator can be used to determine how severely a patient has been affected and is based on the Psoriasis Area Severity Index (PASI).

This widely used measure of the disease’s severity combines an assessment of the overall severity of lesions and disease coverage into a single score from 0 (no disease) to 72 at the top end of the scale.

Janssen’s intuitive app offers clinicians a step-by-step process to do this, whereby they assign a percentage to the extent the disease has affected different regions of the body, and then grade the lesions seen there – based on their similarity to a series images.

Psoriasis, which results in the overproduction of skin cells, is notoriously difficult to treat and affects around 1.5 million people in the UK, up to 20-30% of whom suffer severely.

Janssen’s Stelara, a first-in-class biologic treatment, was approved in Europe last year as a treatment for psoriasis.

• There will be more on iPhone apps in Friday’s post, when the Digital Pharma blog will begin a round-up of big pharma’s applications for the device.

Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.