BrainBlog

From FierceBiotech : Merck KGaA pulls ahead in hot oral MS drug race By John Carroll September 11, 2009 — 8:22am ET Researchers for Merck KGaA say that new analysis of the late-stage data for their oral drug cladribine highlight the drug's potential as a new therapy for multiple sclerosis. Patients taking a short course of the therapy were more likely to go two years without seeing the disease flare up, and that could prove crucial for the developer as it prepares to make its case that cladribine should be neurologists' preferred choice among a slate of experimental oral MS therapies. Read the full article

From The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog : AUGUST 17, 2009, 11:12 AM ET Novartis’s Big Plans for Multiple Sclerosis By Jeanne Whalen [snippet] The FDA gave Novartis the green light today to start selling a copy of Betaseron, the multiple sclerosis drug long sold by Bayer. Why would Novartis want to sell somebody else’s years-old drug? Largely to gain experience in the MS marketplace as Novartis plots a future launch of the MS drug FTY720. “It’s a way to build a strong commercial organization and a strong medical organization ahead of FTY,” Novartis pharmaceuticals chief Joe Jimemez told the Health Blog recently. [snippet] Read the full blog entry ========== Note: Here is a reference to FTY720: Horga A, & Montalban X. (2008). FTY720 (fingolimod) for relapsing multiple sclerosis. Expert Rev Neurother., 8(5) 699-714. Clinical Neuroinmunology Unit, Multiple Sclerosis Center of Catalonia (CEM-Cat), Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona, Spain. FTY720 (fingolimod) ...