The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved adalimumab for treatment of noninfectious intermediate, posterior, and panuveitis in adults, making it the only approved drug for the condition that is not a corticosteroid.
The approval marks the 10th approved indication for adalimumab (Humira) in the United States. It was recently approved for this indication in the European Union as well.
Patients on adalimumab had about half the risk of those on placebo to experience treatment failure (a combination of uveitis flare and decrease in visual acuity) in two pivotal phase III studies, VISUAL-I (hazard ratio, 0.5 for VISUAL-I; P less than .001) and VISUAL-II (HR, 0.57; P = .004). In the trials, patients were treated with an 80-mg loading dose of adalimumab at baseline, followed by a 40-mg subcutaneous injection at week 1 and then 40 mg every other week for up to 80 weeks.
“These approvals provide a valuable option for patients experiencing flare and vision impairment associated with this group of inflammatory diseases of the eye,” Glenn J. Jaffe, MD, of Duke University, Durham, N.C., said in an announcement from the manufacturer of adalimumab, AbbVie. “Data from the robust VISUAL clinical trial program demonstrate the value of Humira as a treatment option for patients with these serious diseases.”