Recently, a biotechnology company announced that gerilizumab IL-6 as a drug for rheumatoid arthritis was under trial in healthy people. Once the safety is proved in human trial, gerilizumab will be a better alternative for rheumatoid arthritis both in effect and cost.
Rheumatoid Arthritis is an immune system originated disease and it appears when the immune system attack body tissues mistakenly as outsiders. Then chronic joints inflammation and inflammation in other organs are caused as the symptoms of mis-attack. The chronic inflammation can lead to damage in the joint 
part and furtherly lead to bone destruction. Current data shows the number of women who contracts rheumatoid arthritis is about three times of that of men. And about 1.3 million people in the United States alone are suffering from this disease.
No cure treatment for Rheumatoid arthritis is available but can only slow the deteriorating speed by application of two classes of drugs and cooperation of patients and family. The appearance of Gerilizumab will improve the situation by a large scale. Gerilizumab as an interleukin-6 inhibitor is also a monoclonal antibody with high bioavailability and longer half life. Gerilizumab will be used probably as a first line drug in the related treatment.
Gerilizumab works by targeting a safe pathway; it will be especially useful for the patients that don’t react to necrosis factor-alpha treatment. With the high bioavailability mentioned, Gerilizumab can even be taken at a frequency of once a month at very low dosage each time, which will greatly decrease the cost, besides its pharmacologic properties will furtherly makes the treatment involving Gerilizumab cost effective.
The result of the human trial of Gerilizumab will be publicly available in the first months of 2016. It’s said by the CEO of the developing company for the innovative drug that Gerilizumab will be one of the best drug choices for Rheumatoid Arthritis patients with a relatively low price.
As a chronic disease, rheumatoid arthritis needs patience and an affordable drug to control the development in a long run. Hope the human trial will be approved safe and the drug is feasible to be applied in RA patients to release the chronic pain soon.