Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★ I know it sounds like a cliche but Catch-22 would definitely be on my list of most impressionable books I read as a teenager. I liked it because of its dark satirical humour, it was written in the third-person and it taught me how absurd war actually is. Catch-22 (and the Great Gatsby) also taught me if you love a book you should never watch the movie; the...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★ “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, Michael Gove, June 2016. Of the many positive things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and our response to it is the end of the era of denigrating the expert. Yes, expertise and in particular deep expertise really matters and that applies to the diagnosis and management of multiple...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ Did you watch the anti-CD20 debate on the triMS-online platform yesterday? The question that was asked was ‘Can we use anti-CD20 therapies as immune reconstitution therapies rather than maintenance therapies?’. I am not sure the debaters answered the question. When I asked Anders Svenningsson, who is probably the world’s biggest adopter of anti-CD20 therapy...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★ I had to have a detailed discussion with a patient this week about starting ocrelizumab during the COVID-19 pandemic. This patient was concerned about (1) the data showing an increased risk of COVID-19 in anti-CD20 treated patients, (2) an increasing number of cases not seroconverting when being infected with the coronavirus and (3) she will not be able to have...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ The late late-breaking session at the MSVirtual2020 meeting, which covered COVID-19 has already received a lot of air-time on social media. The big-data alliance confirmed the Italian data, i.e. that people with MS (pwMS) on anti-CD20 are at higher risk of getting COVID-19 and severe COVID-19 (hospitalisation, intensive care admission and/or ventilation)...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer: ★★★★★ I have recently been criticised by a colleague for supporting the DODO (double-dose ocrelizumab study) and the ADIOS (adaptive dosing ocrelizumab study) studies. How you can I on the one hand support more ocrelizumab and on the other hand suggest reducing the dose in the longterm. I responded that it is all about timing and how you use anti–CD20...
Informing patients about their potential coronavirus risks associated with anti-CD20 therapy is complicated and resulting in our patients being given different advice depending on who they see. The reason for this is that we don’t have the direct evidence to be able to dissect out why people on anti-CD20 therapy are at higher risk of COVID-19 and at higher risk of being admitted to hospital with...
The FDA has just approved ofatumumab for patients with relapsing MS. See Novartis’ press release below. Ofatumumab delivers powerful efficacy with a favorable safety profile and can be self-administered at home, addressing significant unmet needs for people living with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (RMS)1 Approval based on two Phase III ASCLEPIOS studies demonstrating significant...
Just catching up with my reading. Whilst I was away on holiday the ASCLEPIOS I and II trials was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. There is little doubt that ofatumumab is superior to teriflunomide when it comes to suppressing focal inflammation, i.e. relapses, MRI activity and peripheral blood neurofilament levels. However, ofatumumab’s effectiveness against teriflunomide on the...
Will Prof G have to eat his proverbial hat? I have been telling people that an effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is a long way away and that we shouldn’t expect a commercially available vaccine for another 12-18 months. Maybe I am wrong. The Moderna phase 1 results were published by the NEJM yesterday and are more impressive than I expected. These results are so important because the vaccine is...