- Posted May 5, 2026
New Drug Combo Effective Against Treatment-Resistant IBD, Trials Show
A new combination drug therapy could help people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) for whom other medicines have stopped working, according to a pair of new studies.
The treatment combines two drugs already approved to treat inflammatory diseases, guselkubam (Tremfya) and golimumab (Simponi), researchers are reporting today at a joint meeting of four key medical groups in Chicago.
Each drug targets different proteins that drive inflammation related to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, researchers said.
"Currently in IBD treatment each successive therapy produces diminishing returns, and patients who have failed multiple treatments have very limited options," lead researcher Dr. Bruce Sands, chief of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, said in a news release.
"By combining two mechanisms of action, we're seeing efficacy that appears to be additive — without increasing safety risk,” Sands said.
The problem is that the immune system is smart and can work its way around individual anti-inflammatory drugs, said lead researcher Dr. Maria Abreu, executive director of the F. Widjaja IBD Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“In some patients, the immune system essentially finds a way around single therapies,” Abreu said in a news release. “By targeting two pathways at once, we may be able to 'outsmart' the immune system and achieve better outcomes.”
Sands and Abreu conducted two parallel clinical trials examining the combination of guselkumab and golimumab, which have been fused into a single fixed-dose treatment.
Both trials enrolled people with moderately-to-severely active IBD who had already failed one or more therapies. Sand’s trial involved 693 people with Crohn’s disease, and Abreu’s trial enrolled 572 people with ulcerative colitis.
These folks were assigned to receive a placebo, golimumab or guselkumab alone, or the combo drug at one of three doses.
A high-dose version of the combo drug showed improved outcomes among people who’d failed two or more prior drugs, results showed.
People in the Chron’s trial had better response at 48 weeks on a high dose of the combo drug than those receiving golimumab alone, researchers said.
The combo especially benefitted those who had failed two or more prior treatments — their remission rates were more than 20 percentage points higher than gulselkumab and nearly 40 points higher than placebo.
Likewise, people in the ulcerative colitis trial did better with the high-dose combo than with golimumab. Treatment-resistant patients' remission rates ran more than 20 percentage points higher than guselkumab and nearly 20 percentage points higher than placebo.
Based on these results, researchers said the combination should advance to final phase 3 clinical trials, which could provide the proof needed for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.
Johnson & Johnson sponsored both clinical trials.
Sands and Abreu are scheduled to present their findings today at the Digestive Disease Week meeting, which is jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the American Gastroenterological Association, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract.
Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on Crohn’s disease.
SOURCE: Digestive Disease Week, news release, May 5, 2026
