A new European consortium with aims to discover new ways to maximise the impact of prescription drugs for patients suffering from Rheumatoid Arthritis, has welcomed industry partner Daman, a digital healthcare company based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Click to read more.
In its final clinical trial, a new drug for treating the autoimmune disease rheumatoid arthritis has proved to be at least as effective as the current "gold standard" treatment. This opens up new treatment options for affected patients.
Patients under immunosuppressive therapy, who do not respond to primary COVID-19 vaccination, have an increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease courses. Until now, it was not clear whether those patients at risk can benefit from an additional booster vaccination.
As Michael Bonelli, senior author of the Vienna study, explains: “B cells constitute an important cell population for the development of antibodies. We were able to show that more than 50% of patients receiving B-cell-depleting treatment with rituximab still develop antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19], and that there is potentially additional protection via a cellular immune response.”
This underscores the importance of vaccinating immunosuppressed patients against Covid, Bonelli said, while his colleague Daniel Aletaha, head of the university’s division of rheumatology, said they also showed that a third vaccination is sometimes needed for people with autoimmune disease.
“The findings from this study formed the basis for a now completed randomised booster vaccination study, which investigated whether the group of patients receiving rituximab treatment who were unable to produce antibodies following standard vaccination can develop humoral or cellular immunity if given a th