A multiple sclerosis treatment from Novartis cut by a third the rates of relapses that people with the condition have compared to a standard treatment, data presented Friday show. While that efficacy doesn’t match the performance of a rival drug from Roche, Novartis’ treatment has a cleaner safety profile that could give it a shot at being competitive in the market.
In two Phase 3 studies in the relapsing form of MS, the Novartis drug, called remibrutinib, reduced the so-called annualized relapse rate by 35.2% and 31.2% when tested against Sanofi’s approved drug Aubagio. That translates into about one relapse every 13 years, Heinz Wiendl, a neurologist at the University of Freiburg, said while presenting the data from the REMODEL-1 and -2 studies at an MS conference in Toronto.
In its own pivotal studies, Roche’s drug fenebrutinib cut the relapse rate by more than 50% versus Aubagio.