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Genzyme Corporation have announced that the New England Journal of Medicine have published a letter highlighting the long-term five-year outcomes of a randomised multinational study of kidney transplant patients undergoing induction therapy with thymoglobulin .
These long-term results were gathered by a innovative technique, where by clinical trial data and transplant registry data were linked through the practice of a novel analysis technique.
Thymoglobulin is indicated for the treatment of acute renal graft rejection in conjunction with concomitant immunosuppression.
This study examined the use of thymoglobulin for the prevention of acute renal graft rejection (induction).
Daniel C Brennan, director of transplant nephrology, Washington University School of Medicine said, “This study showed that Thymoglobulin had a long-lasting, beneficial and durable effect. Further, the methodology we used could be used to discover the long-term outcomes of any study in kidney transplant patients in the US and could be extrapolated to other fields where there are registry data available.”
Long-term outcomes were obtained in this trial by employing a novel data-collection technique of linking trial and registry data.
At 5 years, the incidence of acute rejection (16.0% versus 30.0%), the need for antibody treatment of acute rejection (3.3% versus 12.0%), and the composite endpoint of acute rejection, graft loss, and death (38.8% versus 52.0%) were all lower among patients treated with Thymoglobulin compared to basiliximab.
Importantly, this study confirmed that the incidence of treated cytomegalovirus infection remained lower In the thymoglobulin group.
