Go­ing for it: GSK’s Hal Bar­ron out­lines a big PhI­II pro­gram for rheuma­toid arthri­tis — go­ing head-to-head with gi­ant ri­vals

Eight months af­ter fail­ing a Phase II test for rheuma­toid arthri­tis, GSK R&D chief Hal Bar­ron is tak­ing his chances and adding one of his fa­vorite ex­per­i­men­tal ther­a­pies to the phar­ma gi­ant’s late-stage pipeline with an am­bi­tious Phase III pro­gram de­signed to ei­ther prove it’s a com­mer­cial con­tender — or not.

Ini­tial­ly cod­ed as GSK3196165 and now dubbed otil­imab, the an­ti­body in­hibits gran­u­lo­cyte-macrophage-colony-stim­u­lat­ing fac­tor. GSK in-li­censed the drug from Ger­many’s Mor­phoSys, which is get­ting a $22 mil­lion mile­stone pay­ment with to­day’s an­nounce­ment. And Bar­ron has de­signed a “unique” trio of late-stage stud­ies that will pit the new drug against two cur­rent ther­a­pies on the mar­ket: Pfiz­er’s JAK in­hibitor Xel­janz — al­ready black boxed with new safe­ty warn­ings that have at­tract­ed the at­ten­tion of reg­u­la­tors — as well as Kevzara, the IL-6 drug ap­proved 2 years ago and field­ed by the Sanofi/Re­gen­eron team.

This is a big field, with plen­ty of new con­tenders.

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