Biotech, Hepatitis C, Vertex
Vertex Fending Off Competitors By Treating the Toughest Patients With Hepatitis C
Luke Timmerman 9/9/08
Vertex Pharmaceuticals is being chased by a couple of deep-pocketed competitors—Schering-Plough and Roche—in the race to develop the next big thing for patients with the hepatitis C virus. Now Vertex, the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company, thinks it has found a way to fend off the challengers. It intends to show its drug—telaprevir—can cure patients who have failed on previous treatments, as well as those who are just beginning therapy.
Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) unveiled this key element of its strategy last month in the design of a 650-patient clinical trial called Realize. The study will look at whether telaprevir can cure a broad swath of hepatitis patients who didn’t respond to a prior round of treatment, and thus are in danger of serious liver damage later in life. The patients include those who didn’t respond at all to a previous treatment, some who responded partially but not enough, and some who were helped temporarily, but eventually relapsed.
Regulators in the U.S. and Europe allowed Vertex to recruit the hardest cases, known as “null responders” into the clinical trial. Those patients aren’t being allowed into a large trial of Schering-Plough’s competitor, boceprevir. Vertex was able to get those patients included based partly on promising data from a mid-stage study called Prove 3, which has shown that 52 percent of patients on telaprevir had no evidence of the hepatitis C virus left in the blood for at least three months after completing therapy. Standard treatments given a second time do that well for about 15 percent of patients. That kind of difference in effectiveness means big bucks for telaprevir: an estimated 6 million people in the U.S. and Europe have chronic hepatitis C infections, and about 650,000 have failed on the standard treatment. Telaprevir alone could generate $2.6 billion in U.S. sales in 2013 when factoring in patients who failed treatment and those who are new to therapy, according to Rachel McMinn, an analyst with Cowen & Co. in San Francisco.
“Vertex’s telaprevir will show strong data in treatment-failure patients that significantly outshines prior data for Schering-Plough’s boceprevir,” said McMinn, in a note to clients last month, which looks ahead to presentations at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases annual meeting in November.
Showing a benefit among the toughest-to-treat patients is important to Vertex, partly because it would appeal to the group of patients who are most motivated to seek new treatment options, and because it could enable the company to make claims that Schering-Plough won’t be able to, says Kurt Graves, Vertex’s chief commercial officer. It also could strengthen the overall package of evidence supporting use of telaprevir, which is being tested in a pivotal study among patients new to treatment, called Advance.
There’s much buzz in the medical and investment communities about both new drugs, protease inhibitors, which have been shown to be about twice as effective at curing the disease as the standard treatments. …Next Page »
Luke Timmerman is the National Biotechnology Editor for Xconomy. You can e-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com, call 206-624-2374, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ldtimmerman.
9/9/08 2:48 am
Any treatment that has high % of cure without the dreadful side affects leaving one worse than before with or without the disease would be welcome that is a fact
9/15/08 12:44 am
For those of us in need – some desperate – for new HCV treatments, this song and dance of study after study for market positioning is just wrong. Telepravir works for a lot of people who haven’t responded to previous treatments. GET IT OUT THERE, VERTEX! LIVES ARE ON THE LINE!
10/23/08 12:37 am
I guess the drug companies have a dilema! They are currently making billiions of dollars on some people being cured. They are also invested rescue drugs that are required by many doing tx due to reduced white and red blood cell indicators. Now many txers are exending to do 72 weeks which means more units sold. Makes you wonder how hard they’re trying, if a cure is found, that gravy train crashes immediately. My sense is that vertex is pushing like crazy because they’re not so heavily invested in current tx regimes like Roche and Schering-Plough.
11/14/08 10:18 pm
If Vertex new hcv drug has already shown so much potential, isn’t there a way to get it approved sooner?
11/29/08 9:02 pm
Any free studies available to get into please?
Any info. would be appreciated
2/21/09 3:14 pm
The FDA are the ones who need to fast track this to approval. I have been watching this for a couple of years now and it looks to me like Vertex is doing everything they can to get this out as quickly as possible. I also understand their caution. We do live in a sue happy society. They need to play by the rules and dot their i s and cross their t s. I am just grateful there is hope on the horizon.
6/30/09 10:47 pm
If there is any way to be a guinea pig in these studies, please someone let me know. thanx Barry in Oregon
7/12/09 8:54 am
Stop playing politics with our lives! I didn’t respond as well as hoped with the 48 week treatment and am borderline cirrohis. I need this as well as thousands of patients like me. I would be more than willing to be a guinea pig. I live in fear every time I go to the doctor that my options are getting fewer, but with this treatment, I have tremendous hope for a cure…but the politics! Vertex…please push this thru!
7/24/09 9:11 pm
HOW CAN I GET INTO ONE OF THESE CLINICAL TESTS,MY SON WHO LIVES IN THAILAND FAILED IN THE FIRST COURSE OF TREATMENTS AND REFUSES ANYTHING THAT MADE HIM FEEL AS MISERABLE AS HE DID FOR 48 WEEKS.
7/24/09 9:48 pm
Patients who want up-to-date information on Vertex clinical trials can check here.
http://www.vrtx.com/current-projects/Clinical-Trials.html
Clinical Trials & Medical Information:
Phone:
877-634-VRTX
617-444-6777
For information on other open clinical trials for Hepatitis C, check here:
http://clinicaltrials.gov/
9/2/09 10:36 am
My husband tried to get into this clinical trial but he was already on Interferon for the 3rd time so they wouldn’t take him in… Please hurry and get it on the market, we would have been willing to pay if it meant he could have gotten into this study. We have heard all good things about it.