Rozanolixizumab is the name of the drug. It’s an FcRn drug that blocks the activity of the FcRn molecule, which would normally preserve antibodies in the bloodstream from being recycled. By blocking the antibody recycling pathway, the antibodies get degraded quickly, sort of like if you think about how plasma exchange works in removing antibodies in other antibody-mediated diseases.
It works essentially the same way as plasma exchange, and IVIG also has that same sort of mechanism in diluting autoantibodies, except this is more of degrading the autoantibodies...
Rozanolixizumab is the name of the drug. It’s an FcRn drug that blocks the activity of the FcRn molecule, which would normally preserve antibodies in the bloodstream from being recycled. By blocking the antibody recycling pathway, the antibodies get degraded quickly, sort of like if you think about how plasma exchange works in removing antibodies in other antibody-mediated diseases.
It works essentially the same way as plasma exchange, and IVIG also has that same sort of mechanism in diluting autoantibodies, except this is more of degrading the autoantibodies. So any disease in which IVIG and plasma exchange are helpful, we think this drug would be useful for. It’s being developed for myasthenia gravis and Guillain-Barré, for example, and we think since MOG is responsive to IVIG and plasma exchange, that it would be useful as well.
So the trial is launching. It just launched. We recruited our first patient in Japan. We hope to open 50 sites in 20 countries and recruit over 100 patients to this study. And the primary outcome is to prevent relapses in MOG. The duration will be about three and a half years total, and we’re hoping that by 2025 or so, we’ll have a readout.