Are there emerging treatments that promise to reduce progression of the disease?
There are a number of endpoints to be used in clinical trials. Only the clinical endpoint are the ones that are really important for registration and in general they are also the only ones that are really interesting for patients. When talking about progression, the usual relapse related endpoints (such as relapses per treatment arm, annualized relapse rate, time to first relapse, relapse severity) are relevant. But when talking about disability related endpoint, we should discuss how we can best measure accumulative disability and whether or not that meets a definition of progression. And then we can talk about phase related changes and see if a phase shift is being delayed. One phase shift hasn’t been attacked until now, and that is the phase shift of RRMS to SPMS. Now if we would do something there, this would really contribute to a phase shift reduction of some importance. There are two possible trials that could be used to measure the prevention of disease progression in later dis
