No­var­tis's asth­ma ‘won­der drug’ basks in the bright spot­light of a UK me­dia fren­zy

The British pa­pers love a med­ical break­through al­most as much as a po­lit­i­cal cri­sis. And that will­ing­ness to fawn over ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta, even from a small study, was on full dis­play with the re­cent hype over fe­vip­iprant, No­var­tis’s pill for se­vere asth­ma.

Re­port­ing in the pres­ti­gious pages of The Lancet, in­ves­ti­ga­tors say that the CRTh2 an­tag­o­nist – now in Phase III with a 2019 launch date planned – dra­mat­i­cal­ly re­duced lev­els of eosoniphils, a key bio­mark­er for mod­er­ate to se­vere asth­ma. Adding the drug to stan­dard of care mas­sive­ly re­duced the lev­els of eosinophils, which dropped from an av­er­age of 5.4% to 1.1% — near­ly nor­mal – in the tri­al, which en­rolled a to­tal of 61 pa­tients.

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