Vertex Pharmaceuticals'
There's big money to be made in the treatment-experienced patients for the second-generation drugs. The current options from Roche and Merck only cure about 50% of the patients treated with them, so there are a lot of patients sitting around with virus running through their blood stream waiting for next-generation drugs to become available.
In a clinical trial dubbed REALIZE, the drug was able to knock down viral levels in hepatitis C patients to undetectable levels -- essentially a cure -- in 65% of patients who had failed a previous therapy. Repeating the current standard of care -- the control group -- resulted in a 17% cure rate in these hard-to-treat patients.
On the surface, that 65% cure rate looks comparable to the 66% of the treatment-experienced patients who were cured on boceprevir, but the control group patients in Merck's trial were cured 21% of the time, meaning that telaprevir apparently did a better job. Vertex was nice enough to break down the cure rates between the treatment classes (those who had relapsed vs. those who had not responded vs. those who had partially responded) in its press release, but Merck didn't. So, we'll have to wait until Merck presents more data before we can get an accurate picture of how the two drugs match up in treatment-experienced patients.
Maybe the best news for Vertex and marketing partner Johnson & Johnson
With the risk nearly gone, Vertex's investors can sit back and wait for the biotech to start bringing in the revenue.
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