Sundheds- og Forebyggelsesudvalget 2012-13
SUU Alm.del Bilag 337
Offentligt
Email:Dear colleagueYou may be interested in the enclosed review dealing with the problem thatan overwhelming majority of patients with chronic immunoinflammatorydiseases are still being treated with repeated injections/infusions of proteindrugs without knowledge of the immunopharmacological features that governdrug actions in these patients.In case of anti-TNF-alpha biopharmaceuticals, this has gone on despite morethan a decade of reports on induction of anti-drug antibodies and associatedsafety issues, and despite knowledge of response failure in a largepercentage of these patients - and irrespective of the enormous burden thatthis imposes on health-care.Drug immunogenicity has been shown to be a serious problem with prolongedbiotherapies of other diseases, e.g. IFN-beta in multiple sclerosis and factorVIII in hemophiliacs. Nonetheless, most clinicians still administer anti-TNFdrugs solely on a trial-and-error clinical outcome basis. The enclosed printdiscusses these issues and the central importance of (not) using propertechnologies for drug and anti-drug antibody measurements.Best regards,---Klaus Bendtzen, prof. MD. DMSc.Institute for Inflammation Research IIR 7521,Rigshospitalet Natl. Univ. HospitalCopenhagen, DenmarkEmail: [email protected]
P.S. I also enclose a figure showing the substantial savings that may beachieved when immunopharmacological knowledge is included in therapeuticdecisionmaking, in this case in a prospective study of Danish Crohn's patientstreated with infliximab.