Brivaracetam effective in epilepsy, says UCB

Belgian drugmaker UCB says that the results from two Phase IIb studies indicate that its developmental epilepsy treatment brivaracetam brings about a good response rate in patients suffering from partial onset epilepsy. The firm added that the results, which were announced at the 27th International Epilepsy Congress meeting in Singapore, also demonstrated that brivaracetam has a comparable tolerability profile to placebo.

In one of the studies, in patients aged between 16 and 65 years whose condition was uncontrolled using one or two anti-epileptic agents, brivaracetam at a range of daily doses (50mg, 20mg or 5mg) brought about a significant reduction in the frequency of seizures from baseline of 53.1%, 42.6% and 29.9%, respectively, compared with a 21.7% drop in the placebo group.

The second trial, which recruited 157 patients with refractory partial onset epilepsy, showed that 50mg/day brivaracetam cut seizure rates from baseline by 38.2%, compared with the 18.9% reduction in the control group.