Investigational Pump Agents to Treat Parkinson Disease

At the 2024 American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting, NeurologyLive^® sat down with Parkinson disease (PD) expert Daniel Kremens, MD, JD, to discuss some of the top data being presented at the meeting on novel approaches in development for the treatment of the movement disorder. Kremens discussed these various presentations, offering his perspective on the clinical landscape.

In this segment, Kremens discussed a number of investigational pump therapies, including ND0612 and ABBV-951, which may become available to patients PD in the near future. He spoke on how some of these agents differ, the advantages to each, and what they provide to the PD community. He spoke specifically about the early benefits seen with ND0612 and the long-term sustained efficacy and safety observed with ABBV-951.

00:00 – Advantages in pump therapies to treat PD

01:00 – Early benefits of ND0612 treatment

01:40 – Open-label extension results of ABBV-951

Transcript below edited for clarity.

Daniel Kremens, MD, JD: We're really excited in the United States with the emergence of pump therapies. Currently, we have no approved subcutaneous pumps. We do have the carbidopa levodopa intestinal gel pump, but these other pumps are much smaller and much more convenient for patients to use. There are currently three different pumps that are under review by the FDA: subcutaneous apomorphine pump, a foscarbidopa/foslevodopa pump, and a carbidopa/levodopa pump. I think that these are really going to offer opportunities for patients to achieve a more continuous dopaminergic stimulation, and hopefully help solve that problem with motor fluctuations and even potentially help reduce dyskinesias.

Patients want to feel better. So if we have a product that we can start the patient on and know reliably that we're going to get early benefit, that's certainly something that we take into consideration. What we saw in this study was that patients reported benefit within three days of starting therapy with this pump. Again, I think it's a potentially exciting option for patients to know that they can get a reliable and efficacious result quickly, because patients with Parkinson are suffering. All these pumps will provide an exciting new option for patients.

This was a study looking at a subcutaneous pump using a foscarbidopa/foslevodopa pump. What they found in the pivotal trials was that patients had significant improvement in their ON time along with reduction in their OFF time. This has been followed by an open-label extension study. What we're learning is that the drug remains safe and efficacious, even in the open label phase where we didn't see any additional safety signals that were concerning. This is an option for patients that I think will be really important to help them maintain their their ON time in a safe and efficacious fashion, long term.