Market for chronic tophaceous gout medications will be led by drug that resolves tophi in less than a year

Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that, in the U.S. and Europe, a drug that resolves tophi in less than one year would become the patient share leader in the chronic tophaceous gout patient subpopulation and would be used in the vast majority of patients who suffer severe tophaceous gout, according to surveyed U.S. and European rheumatologists.

"The limitations of currently available chronic gout medications, including the sales leader Prometheus Laboratories Inc./GlaxoSmithKline's Zyloprim/Zyloric, provide considerable commercial opportunity for emerging antigout therapies that offer a faster rate of tophus resolution," stated Decision Resources Analyst Christine Helliwell, Ph.D.

The new report entitled Gout: Novel Biologic Revs Up a Slow Market also finds that Savient Pharmaceuticals' Krystexxa will earn Decision Resources' proprietary clinical gold standard status in 2013 and through 2018 due to its competitive advantages in efficacy over the sales leader Zyloprim/Zyloric and Decision Resources' current gold standard, Takeda's Uloric. Potentially the first biologic to market for urate-lowering in chronic gout, Krystexxa allows more than 60 percent of previously treatment-refractory patients to reach serum uric acid targets.

"Krystexxa offers advantages on almost all efficacy attributes and the improvements in attributes relating to serum uric acid levels and tophus burden are distinctly superior to the sales leader, Zyloprim/Zyloric, and to our current gold standard, Uloric," added Dr. Helliwell. "Not only is Krystexxa more efficacious among gout patients, but it will increase the treatable population."