From hours to min­utes? Genen­tech says Ocre­vus sub­cu­ta­neous for­mu­la­tion works just as well as IV

To re­ceive Roche’s mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis drug Ocre­vus, pa­tients cur­rent­ly have to sit through two to four hours of in­fu­sion every six months. A year ago, Roche launched a Phase III study to test an idea: Can a new for­mu­la­tion cut down that time to 10 min­utes?

New Phase III re­sults sug­gest the an­swer is yes, the com­pa­ny re­port­ed Thurs­day.

With­out break­ing down the num­bers, Roche said its Ocre­vus sub­cu­ta­neous in­jec­tion “was shown to be non-in­fe­ri­or to Ocre­vus giv­en by in­tra­venous in­fu­sion,” as mea­sured by lev­els of the drug in the blood over 12 weeks. Look­ing at mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI) le­sions ac­tiv­i­ty in the brain, the sub­cu­ta­neous ver­sion was al­so com­pa­ra­ble in keep­ing the le­sions un­der con­trol — with a con­sis­tent safe­ty pro­file.

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