Shoot­ing for a new stan­dard on os­teoarthri­tis, Mer­ck KGaA out­lines promis­ing da­ta for a po­ten­tial game-chang­er

Mer­ck KGaA’s phar­ma group is tak­ing one more step in a long jour­ney to­ward re­hab­bing its rep in the R&D field this week­end. Com­pa­ny ex­ecs turned up at the ACR sci­en­tif­ic con­fer­ence in San Diego to roll out a promis­ing look at some key Phase II os­teoarthri­tis da­ta — which comes with a crit­i­cal caveat.

The drug is sprifer­min, which Mer­ck Serono has had in its pipeline for the past 13 years af­ter bag­ging it from Zy­mo­Ge­net­ics, now a part of Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb. In the first two-year ef­fi­ca­cy as­sess­ment of the five-year study, re­searchers are now proud­ly point­ing to a slight in­crease of car­ti­lage in the knee, as op­posed to the re­morse­less de­cline that leads to ex­pen­sive knee re­place­ment surgery.

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