A closely watched therapy developed by Johnson & Johnson failed to show a statistically meaningful improvement for patients with inflammatory bowel disease. But the company plans to advance the drug into late-stage testing, focusing on a growing subgroup of patients.
On Tuesday, trial investigators presented the results of Johnson & Johnson’s DUET study, testing how well combining the drugs Tremfya and Simponi would stop the immune system from mistakenly attacking healthy tissues in the digestive tract. It’s a follow-up to a 2022 clinical trial that showed a significant benefit to patients, nearly doubling the rates of disease remission and spurring several companies to start developing combination approaches for IBD.
Johnson & Johnson tested its combined therapy, dubbed JNJ-4804, in two Phase 2b clinical trials hitting both major forms of inflammatory bowel disease — ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. In each trial, the combination therapy performed better than the individual drugs, but did not meet the primary endpoint of clinical remission.
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