Medivir AB (STO: MVIR), a pharmaceutical company with a focus on oncology, announced on Friday that new data from the initial phase II study of MIV-711, which demonstrated disease-modifying activity in patients with moderate knee osteoarthritis after only six months of treatment, will be presented during the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) annual meeting, which will take place from 19 October 2018 to 24 October 2018 in Chicago, US.

This presentation was made on 21 October 2018 by the study's lead investigator Dr Philip Conaghan, professor of Musculoskeletal Medicine at the University of Leeds in the UK.

The abstract of the presentation is 'The Potential Clinical Relevance of Imaging Biomarker Data from Short-Term Interventional Trials in Osteoarthritis: A Comparison of the Cathepsin K Inhibitor MIV-711 Phase 2a MRI Knee Joint Data and KL-Matched 5577 Knee Control Data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative'

The authors are P. G. Conaghan, M. A. Bowes, S. R. Kingsbury, A. Brett, G. Guillard, Å. Jansson, C. Wadell, R. Bethell and J. Öhd.

MIV-711 is a potent and selective inhibitor of cathepsin K, the principal protease involved in breaking down collagen in bone and cartilage. It is being developed to slow or reverse the progressive degeneration of joints affected by osteoarthritis and is therefore a potential DMOAD.