Andreas Muehler, MD, chief medical officer at Immunic Therapeutics, discusses vidofludimus calcium, an experimental therapy for the treatment of relapsing and progressive forms of multiple sclerosis (MS). Muehler reflects on treatment needs across MS populations, including patient priorities, safety concerns, and the importance of therapies that balance efficacy with tolerability.
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Transcript
I think from our point of view, there are multiple populations and subpopulations of MS where this drug will fit very well what patients need.
So in relapsing MS, you always think about patients who are just being diagnosed with MS. And there’s a proportion of patients that is very sensitive to the safety and tolerability of treatments.
And there’s several of these surveys that usually say about 30% of patients really value safety over efficacy, which is a strange thing for me because it’s a, it’s a very serious disease, MS. But this is what the research shows.
And those patients often tend to forgo treatment for some time before they have more disease activity. So here we see, for example, it plays by, say the drug, that what the safety tolerability is, so far what we have seen is comparable to placebo.
Doesn’t have a lot of these side effects that the traditional relapsing MS drugs have. Maybe they offer a alternative for patients who value the safety tolerability very much right after diagnosis.
Because a lot of patients actually are quite different. They say, “This is a serious disease. I want to have the best drug,” and that’s why we see anti-CD20 antibodies do so well, yes, in these early treatment.
We would be perfectly positioned for patients that have a high risk of infections, where you have to be mindful that their immune system is no longer at 100%.
So you don’t want to further decrease the immune function for these patients. And that would be a nice drug. I think that would fit I think that medical need.
On the other way, of course, you have relapsing and secondary progressive and primary progressive patients.
And with this mix of mechanism of actions that we have, I think we see this as a drug that could be used in really the continuum of the life of the patient and have a benefit in all of their stages of the disease.
I think over time it will have several spaces where it will fit. But overall, we do think that is a patient population, that they really have a sizable portion of the future treatment of MS patients.