VIDEO: Obeticholic acid improves survival in primary biliary cholangitis

In a video exclusive, Gideon Hirschfield, PhD, FRCP, of the University of Toronto, reported the potential of obeticholic acid for improving transplant-free survival among patients with primary biliary cholangitis.

Specific data from the long-term extension of the phase 3 POISE trial revealed, compared with primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) natural history data from the Global PBC and UK-PBC databases, patients treated with obeticholic acid had a 77% to 80% lower risk for death or liver transplant.

“The top-line, take-home messages for the study were one, that we could create so-called synthetic controls from a real-world cohort that are reasonable matches for the patients in a clinical trial setting who have been followed up over 5 years and for whom we know their event rate,” Hirschfield said. “The second thing we could do is we could look at the event rate in both of our real-world cohorts, and we could show in both cohorts that long-term use of obeticholic acid in the trial setting seem to be associated with better transplant-free survival than our external controls.”