[New drugs in rheumatology].

Because the development of a novel drug or therapeutic strategy can be monitored using the respective databases such as clinicaltrials.gov, true surprises in the field of therapeutic advances have become a very rare event. On the other hand, owing to the common variability of the individual entities and the large number of rare diseases within rheumatology and clinical immunology, introducing a novel drug is a very challenging task. This problem also applies specifically to the first phase after approval, as the usually strict in- and exclusion criteria of a clinical trial only match a small portion of the population with the target disease. Therefore, the numerous novel treatments that have been or are about to be introduced into clinical rheumatology are more than welcome. Key examples are rituximab for ANCA-associated vasculitides, ustekinumab for psoriatic arthritis, or interleukin-1 inhibitors for complicated gout--with more to come including a large group of intracellular kinase or extracellular macrophage inhibitors.