Elan/Biogen announce Tysabri’s use in cutting Crohn’s hospitalisations

Irish pharmaceutical firm Elan and its US partner Biogen have today announced that their multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri has been shown to significantly reduce the rate of hospitalisation in patients with moderate-to-severe Crohn’s disease.

The data was presented at an oral session at the American College of Gastroenterology Annual Scientific Meeting in San Diego.

“Hospitalisation accounts for a large proportion of the cost of Crohn’s disease management,” said Corey Siegel MD, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Centre, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Centre in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and lead author of the analysis. “Therefore, we were encouraged to see that Tysabri reduced hospitalisation rates, particularly in the more difficult-to-treat subsets of patients previously treated with anti-TNFα therapy.”

“The results of this analysis showing reduced hospitalisation rates, together with subset data previously announced at Digestive Disease Week in May, provide additional support that Tysabri is an important treatment option for patients with this chronic and debilitating disease who have failed anti-TNFα therapies,” said Elan President Carlos Paya.

“Tysabri continues to show benefits in improving quality of life, in Crohn’s disease patients, as well as in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients who also exhibit benefits across clinical and radiological measures,” Paya added.

In early 2008, Tysabri was approved in the US. to induce and maintain clinical response and remission in adult patients with moderately-to-severely active Crohn’s disease with evidence of inflammation who have had an inadequate response to, or are unable to tolerate, conventional CD therapies and inhibitors of TNF-alpha.

In the US Tysabri is also approved for relapsing forms of MS and in the EU for relapsing-remitting MS.

However, Tysabri does increase the risk of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), an opportunistic viral infection of the brain, although less than one patient in 1,000 develops PML, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.