According to a study published in 'Rheumatology and Therapy', switching from intravenous (IV) to subcutaneous (SC) tocilizumab found to maintain the efficacy of treatment for 6 months in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. Jean Darloy et al. investigated the maintenance of the efficacy of subcutaneous tocilizumab 6 months post switching from IV to SC among RA patients in a real-world setting. The secondary objectives were studying disease and patients characteristics, efficacy of SC  tocilizumab 12 months after switching, maintenance of therapeutic characteristics and find out  predictive factors of switching. The RoSwitch was based on a French regional database- ‘‘RIC Nord de France'' Electronic Medical Records.

This was a 1-year, non-interventional study which used secondary data focusing on the exchange information on treated patients suffering from chronic inflammatory rheumatisms between hospital and office-based clinicians. The researchers of this study assessed all the RA patients of the shared medical file "RIC Nord de France", treated with tocilizumab, switching or not from IV to SC tocilizumab, between April 2015 - January 2016. The proportion of patients in their DAS28-ESR category remission/low disease activity (LDA) or moving to an inferior DAS28-ESR category at 6 months comprised of the primary effectiveness endpoint. The RoSwitch was an observational study, without randomization, hence a propensity score was built in a sensitivity analysis to balance on RA and patients' attributes at inclusion between the switching and no-switching groups.

An improvement of primary DAS28-ESR category or maintenance in DAS28-ESR remission/LDA at 6 months was observed in 203 patients. The maintenance of efficacy at 6 and 12 months was observed in the RoSwitch study. There were similar therapeutic maintenance rates for the switch and no-switch patients. At inclusion, no clinical factor was concerned with the switch in patients in remission/LDA.