Bayer’s Betaferon Extends Multiple Sclerosis Patients’ Lives, Study Finds

Bayer AG’s betaferon multiple sclerosis treatment helped patients live longer when taken soon after the onset of the disease in a study researchers said is the first to show such a drug extends patients’ lives.

Patients who got betaferon soon after diagnosis were 39 percent less likely to be dead more than two decades later than those who were given a placebo, researchers said in a study released today at the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Long-term data establishing effectiveness and safety may help differentiate older MS treatments like the Bayer drug, approved in the U.S. in 1993, from newer treatments such as Novartis AG’s pill Gilenya, lead researcher Anthony Reder, director of the University of Chicago MS Clinic, said in a conference call with reporters.

“The number I’m giving you today is a bird in the hand, here, with a very prominent effect,” Reder said.

Merck KGaA’s Rebif and Biogen Idec Inc.’s Avonex, both beta interferons in the same family as the Bayer drug, might also be expected to show a similar survival benefit, Reder said. Merck, based in Darmstadt, Germany, and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen Idec haven’t tested survival over such a long time window, he said. The data isn’t likely to come up in a shorter trial because patients may live for a long time with the debilitating neurological disease, he said.

With funding from Bayer, based in Leverkusen, Germany, Reder and other researchers tracked down all but six of the 372 patients who participated in a betaferon trial in 1988, before the drug was approved in the U.S. or Europe.