Another anti-B cell drug starts MS trial

The Seattle drug company Zymogenetics has announced the launch of a phase 2 trial of its drug Atacicept for relapsing MS. This trial is being conducted in partnership with EMD Serono and will involve 300 subjects. (Here's the clinicaltrials.gov listing.) This drug, like several others being evaluated for MS, targets the involvement of B cells in the disease.

Interestingly, this study includes a placebo arm in addition to three treatment arms at different dose levels. As reported previously in MSNews, the ethics of placebo-controlled trials using subjects for whom effective treatments are available are being called into question. In this trial, subjects with prior immunomodulatory drug experience are excluded, so the study won't be recruiting subjects who didn't respond to available drugs. Also, Atacicept is injectable, not oral, so objection to available drugs on the basis of needle aversion isn't relevant either.