Avadel Pharmaceuticals announces publication of survey data on oxybate

Avadel Pharmaceuticals announced the publication of survey data describing clinician preferences among oxybate treatments for patients living with narcolepsy. The paper, titled “Clinician Preferences for Oxybate Treatment for Narcolepsy: Survey and Discrete Choice Experiment,” was published in Advances in Therapy. Discrete choice experiments are studies designed to characterize and quantify drivers of preferences for attributes. Clinicians selected from hypothetical, randomly generated medicine profiles to determine which medication they preferred overall, which would improve patient quality of life, and which would reduce patient anxiety and stress. Prior to the DCE, a survey to understand perspectives of first generation, twice-nightly oxybates, and other treatments for narcolepsy, was undertaken. Clinicians reported moderate to high satisfaction with immediate-release oxybate treatments; however, clinicians indicated that twice-nightly dosing was a significant stressor for patients. In the DCE, the frequency of oxybate treatment dosing was the most important driver for overall product choice, improved patient quality of life, and reduced patient anxiety and stress; once-nightly dosing was preferred over twice-nightly. The frequency of oxybate treatment dosing, driven by once-nightly dosing, was more than twice as important for overall product choice than the next two attributes, which were adverse reactions and sodium content, respectively. Similarly, frequency of oxybate treatment dosing, driven by once-nightly dosing, was more than double in relative importance, for patient quality of life and for reducing patient anxiety/stress, than other attributes. This DCE validates a previously published DCE in patients, in which dosing frequency was also shown to be the most important driver of patients’ preferred oxybate treatment. These data underscore the long unmet need for an oxybate treatment that does not require middle-of-the-night dosing.