Tracking down nearly all 372 multiple sclerosis patients involved in a pivotal clinical trial of a drug decades ago has allowed a group of researchers from several institutions, led by professors at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of Chicago, to a surprising discovery.
The clinical trial, conducted in the late 1980s, involved the biotech drug interferon beta-1b – an injectable protein that in 1993 became the first pharmaceutical approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating multiple sclerosis.
Now, more than two decades later, the researchers are reporting that the people who received interferon in the trial, as opposed to a placebo, were only about half as likely to have died in the decades since....
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