Lilly's Taltz scrapes win against Humira in psoriatic arthritis

Eli Lilly’s Taltz has beaten AbbVie’s blockbuster Humira in a psoriatic arthritis study involving patients who hadn’t been treated before with a disease-modifying drug, but only just. Lilly reported last year that the SPIRIT-H2H trial had shown Taltz (ixekizumab) met its primary endpoint of superiority to Humira (adalimumab) as measured by the proportion of patients who saw their disease activity cut by 50% as well as complete skin clearance, without providing the data. At the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology (EULAR) in Madrid it has now revealed that the proportion of patients who achieved the primary endpoint at 24 weeks was 36% with Taltz and 28% with Humira, which just met the threshold for statistical significance with a P value of less than <0.05. Breaking down the results, the IL-17 inhibitor was found to be around the same as Humira on the 50% improvement in disease activity (ACR50) score – at 51% versus 47% with AbbVie’s drug – and had a stronger impact on the skin clearance (PASI 100) measure (60% versus 47%) with a P value of 0.001. The results of the open-label phase 3b/4 trial show that most of the benefit over Humira appears to come from resolving the skin symptoms of psoriatic arthritis, an indication for which Taltz was approved in 2017 after getting the go-ahead initially in plaque psoriasis in 2016.