Two novel drug treatments show promise against gout and colitis, painful conditions that plague millions of people worldwide.
Febuxostat, which is awaiting approval from U.S. regulators, would be the first new medicine in four decades for gout, which is becoming more common in this country.
Gout, a type of arthritis, is so painful patients cannot tolerate bedding touching tender spots. There have been no new drugs for it since 1964.
Infliximab, sold under the brand name Remicade for arthritis and Crohn’s disease, was shown to sharply reduce bloody diarrhea, cramps and other symptoms of ulcerative colitis, another immune-system disorder that erodes the large intestine.
The studies were reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
The gout study involved about 760 patients and compared febuxostat with allopurinol, both of which remove excess urate from the blood. Urate deposits crystals in the feet and other joints, causing painful inflammation.
Over a year, febuxostat was three times more effective at lowering urate to a healthy level. But the febuxostat patients only had slightly fewer gout attacks by the end.
“You need to be able to follow these patients, I believe, much longer” to see if febuxostat reduces gout attacks better, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Becker, a rheumatologist and professor at University of Chicago.
Remicade, a genetically engineered drug, was tested on hundreds of patients with poorly controlled colitis in two international studies.
After about a year, about 20 percent of patients on Remicade and just 9 percent on a dummy medication had so few symptoms they were taken off steroids, immune-suppressing drugs that have serious side effects.
“This is as good as we’ve done” with treatments for this “horrible” disease, said Dr. Scott Plevy, co-director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at University of Pittsburgh. He was not involved in the study.
