If approved, the drug is likely to hit the market in late 2010. All the profits accounting from its sales would be shared by HGS and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.
The industry analysts and lupus experts had always doubted if there can ever be a medicine that can cure the disease, especially when it has been more than 50 years since a lupus drug was last approved.
But H. Thomas Watkins, chief executive of HGS, was positive and said, “We’ve got a good chance to redefine the standard of care for patients living with lupus.”
Sandra C. Raymond, the President and chief executive of the Lupus Foundation of America was quoted as saying, “Individuals with lupus and their families have waited more than 50 years to hear that it is possible to develop therapies that control the disease.”
She further added, “We believe that this is a significant first step in developing the full arsenal of therapies and personalized treatment lupus requires.”
How Benlysta works
Benlysta works by manipulating the activity of a protein that becomes hyperactive in lupus patients.
Recent trials discovered that Benlysta showed positive results in many lupus patients after a year. These patients were administered a higher dosage of the drug which enabled the drug to meet its target.
However, a lower dosage of the drug could not meet that target.
Overall, it was found that 43.2 percent of patients responded to the drug at a higher dose. On the other hand, 40.6 percent responded to the lower dose.
Lupus-an autoimmune disease
Lupus is basically an autoimmune disease, wherein the immune system
goes out of control and starts killing the healthy tissues. Every patient reacts differently to it and therefore it becomes all the more difficult to treat the disease.
While some patients develop fever and have swollen knees, others can have kidney or heart problems.
As per statistics released by the Lupus Foundation of America, nearly 1.5 million Americans have been affected by one or the other form of the lupus disease. Till now, it has been mostly treated with the help of chemotherapy and steroids.
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