The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has announced a new draft guidance recommending Abbvie’s Rinvoq (upadacitinib), putting the drug in the running with the company’s very own blockbuster Humira.

The treatment has been recommended as an option for severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a lifetime condition that can severely reduce quality of life.

Rinvoq has already been available in the US since last August, and in Europe since December, and is now making waves in the UK market. NICE currently recommends several disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) for active severe RA, however some patients do not respond to these and welcome other options such as the Abbvie JAK1 selective inhibitor.

The organisation says that the decision was based on clinical trials which showed that upadacitinib with methotrexate or a conventional disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) is more effective than methotrexate or a conventional DMARD alone and provides patients with an alternative option.

Further to this, the treatment is also likely to work as well as other biological DMARDs that NICE currently recommends for severe RA, meaning that approximately 54,000 people could benefit from this new treatment.

Currently, an estimated 400,000 people in the UK are living with rheumatoid arthritis, the majority of whom don’t achieve remission.