Article Highlight

Through a PCORI research funding enhancement, which the PCORI-funded COMBAT-MS study received in 2020 to quickly initiate new research related to COVID-19, the team comparing the safety and effectiveness of long-term medicines used to treat multiple sclerosis (MS) used its enhancement to see whether patients taking these drugs were more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 than the public. As reported in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, patients with MS treated with the drug rituximab were at increased risk of hospitalization but not ventilatory support or death from COVID‐19 compared to the general population.