Saturday, August 31, 2013

Weekend Links: ChemoCentryx Drug Crohn Failure, Chronic Bowel Disease Increases in UAE, Vedolizumab Remission

ChemoCentryx SHIELD-1 for Verniron Fails
     The drug company ChemoCentryx that their drug verciron (chemokine receptor CCR9) really didn't help patients with Crohn's disease. The clinical endpoint is was whether or not patients has a decrease of at least 100 points in their CDAI score after 4 months. 608 patients were enrolled in the study (which is not only timely but very costly). Vercirnon was suppose to launch in 2016. Vercirnon was an oral drug and had lower costs associated with it since it wasn't a biologic which are much more expensive according to this article.

Bowel Disease Increasing In UAE
     It appears that doctors in the UAE are seeing a rise in the amount of inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Nathwani has said he has seen a 10%-15% increase since 2007. Dr. Nathwani sees about 3 or 4 new patients every week with IBD every week. Dr. Kataa says that white people who are young are a higher risk of getting it. Perhaps one theory which I might believe to be true is the clean hypothesis which basically states that autoimmune diseases are on the rise because we might be in fact too clean which explains why developed countries have seen an increase in autoimmune diseases while undeveloped countries with more parasites have fewer cases of autoimmune disease. The pigworm drug trials will shed more light onto this.

Vedolizumab Helps Remission for Ulcerative Colitis
According to this study from the New England Journal of Medicine. The medicine actually had better results for patients with ulceartive colitis than Crohn's disease. In patients with ulcerative colitis 42% were in clinical remission after one year according to this article. The remission rate for Crohn's patients was only 15%. This is a very low remission rate for Crohn's. What would be interesting to see if the 15% of Crohn's patients had anything in common.

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