PharmaEssentia recently launched the What Counts campaign for its polycythemia vera (PV) drug Besremi.

What Counts focuses on ensuring patients are being treated for all the “counts” associated with PV, a rare blood cancer that causes bone marrow to over-produce red blood cells.

On the Besremi website, PharmaEssentia provides a detailed rundown on how Besremi works by targeting the bone marrow directly. Notably, Besremi isn’t chemotherapy and instead is an interferon that’s taken once every two weeks.

The campaign also includes advocacy groups dedicated to cancer and patients living with PV and an omnichannel approach complete with social media outreach.

Besremi was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in November 2021 after the agency initially denied the drug in March of that year. It currently has orphan drug designation status for PV treatment in the U.S.

That approval was based on data from PharmaEssentia’s PEGINVERA and PROUD/CONTINUATION-PV studies which found that after 7.5 years of treatment with Besremi, patients with PV saw a complete hematological response.

While PharmaEssentia rolls out the What Counts campaign, the company is exploring another avenue for Besremi – whether it can be used to treat essential thrombocythemia (ET), a rare blood cancer that’s caused by too many platelets in the blood. The pharma announced this week that it was launching a Phase 2b trial for Besremi in ET patients in North America.

The goal is to discover whether Besremi has efficacy in other disorders under the myeloproliferative neoplasms umbrella — which include both PV and ET.

“Years of ongoing research have demonstrated that there is an important role for monopegylated interferon to improve the care paradigm for people who suffer from chronic, progressive myeloproliferative neoplasms,” Raymond Urbanski, head of clinical development and medical affairs at PharmaEssentia, said in a statement. “We’ve delivered on this through our first indication in PV, and now we are expanding our focus into ET.”

“This important study will provide useful insights into the role of this novel interferon to overcome the limitations of the current options available today and potentially represent a real advancement in the care of these patients,” added Dr. Lucia Masarova, an assistant professor at the department of leukemia at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.