A new drug for people who have one of the worst forms of multiple sclerosis aims to make treatment much easier for patients.
Ocrevus is a medicine commonly used to treat primary progressive MS, but it can take up to four hours to receive intravenously. A new version called “Ocrevus Zunovo” was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is reportedly much quicker to inject.
“Not everybody has the luxury of being able to spend half a day in some sort of infusion chair,” said Dr. Robert Shin, director of the Multiple Sclerosis and Clinical Neuroimmunology Division at UVA Health.
Ocrevus Zunovo is given using a small needle that allows for the medicine to be injected under the skin and not through a vein. It only takes 10 minutes to administer, followed by a 15-minute observation period.
“So, what used to take hours, we can now do in less than 30 minutes,” Shin said. “So, it’s pretty exciting, I think.”
Shin said while D.C.-area patients have better access to infusion centers, for people in rural areas, this can be a game changer because they can receive the medicine during a regular neurologist checkup, twice a year.
“A lot of my patients now at UVA come from many hours away, and so being able to combine treatment with your clinic visit (is) just something that we weren’t able to do before,” Shin said.
Multiple sclerosis affects thousands of people across the country. Multiple sclerosis is a potentially disabling disease that occurs when immune system cells mistakenly attack the protective coating on nerve fibers, gradually eroding them.
For people suffering from multiple sclerosis, the goal of doctors is to slow the progression or even stop it using one of dozens of treatments available.
“They’re (B cells) really sort of involved, I think, in triggering that inflammation in MS,” Shin said.
Like the original version of Ocrevus, Ocrevus Zunovo is also used to treat people with the more common “relapsing remitting MS,” with which MS attacks are followed by periods of recovery.
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