For many patients with rheumatoid arthritis, improvements in pain, physical function, fatigue, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are more important and meaningful than improvements in joint swelling, tenderness, or inhibition of structural damage. These patient-perceived benefits of RA therapy contribute importantly to overall clinical efficacy.

This paper presents patient-reported outcomes (PROs) form the ORAL Step trail, which assessed tofacitinib 5 mg or 10 mg twice daily, or ...

February 2014

Two systematic literature reviews were undertaken to update the safety findings on synthetic and biological DMARDs in order to inform the updates to the EULAR recommendations to the treatment of RA. Of 10,559 articles screened, 49 were included for review covering a diverse range of outcomes. In the main these showed the patients on bDMARDs had a significantly greater risk of serious infections and tuberculosis compared with csDMARDs, while differences in data between studies mean a slight incre...

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August 2013

The JAK inhibitor tofacitinib for active rheumatoid arthritis: results from phase III trials

International Journal of Clinical Rheumatology June 2013; 8(3):311–13

The tofacitinib ORAL research program involves six phase 3 trials (Standard, Solo, Step, Scan, Sync and Start) to assess the safety and efficacy of tofacitinib 5 and 10 mg twice daily as monotherapy, or with either background MTX or traditional DMARD therapy. This report by Salgado et al. provides an overall analysis of the each of the study designs and the clinical results to date. The results show that tofacitinib effectively controlled the signs and symptoms of RA across a range of patient po...

June 2013

This article focuses on the development of new small molecular inhibitors of Janus kinases (Jaks) in clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Of these, tofacitinib is at the most advanced stage of its clinical development and this article includes an overview of the results from the main tofacitinib clinical trials to date. These include the ORAL-Start study in methotrexate (MTX)-naïve patients; ORAL-Scan in inadequate responders to MTX; ORAL-Solo and ORAL-Sync in inadequate responders to ...

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