A common take on Intercept Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s obeticholic acid (OCA) status as the likely first-to-market drug for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is that the drug will have a safety and tolerability profile that may cause clinicians and patients to not want to use it or to abandon it at the first sign of a better treatment option. Intercept presented data at the 2019 American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases meeting in Boston that it thinks shows that to be a lesser concern.
The New York-based firm presented data on 10 November indicating that patient-reported outcomes show pruritus may not be as critical...