Shield Therapeutics: Ferric maltol may be effective in patients with active inflammatory markers

Shield Therapeutics’s study suggests that ferric maltol may be effective in patients with active inflammatory markers, and that the ongoing comparative trial of ferric maltol against iv iron will be useful to challenge the prevalent doctrine prohibiting treatment of patients with active systemic inflammation with oral iron.

The study to be presented at the British Society of Gastroenterology meeting in Manchester, on Thursday, is named “Disease activity affects response to Enteral Iron Supplementation; post-hoc analysis of data from the Aegis Study”.

Shield explained in its announcement that ferric maltol (Feraccru) is an iron-based therapy for the treatment of iron deficiency anaemia (IDA) and represents the Group’s lead asset.

Elevated levels of hepcidin (the “master regulator” of iron) and other inflammatory markers, such as C-Reactive Protein (CRP) have been associated with poor absorption of oral iron. The aim of the analysis was to investigate the effect of CRP and hepcidin at baseline on the response of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients with IDA to treatment with ferric maltol.

In this retrospective analysis of factors predicting response to oral ferric maltol in IBD patients with IDA, the master iron regulatory protein, hepcidin, did not appear to be correlated with treatment response, potentially a feature of ferric maltol’s mode of absorption. Neither did baseline inflammation as measured by CRP, impact negatively on the haemoglobin response to ferric maltol in this study.  This suggests that ferric maltol maintains absorption and efficacy even in patients with active inflammation, however, it seems that patients with elevated CRP at baseline may require a longer course of treatment to replenish iron stores.