The drugs closest to market, Merck’s boceprevir and telaprevir from Vertex and &

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The drugs closest to market, Merck’s boceprevir and telaprevir from Vertex and &

N.J. pharmaceutical companies lead in development of new Hepatitis C treatmentBy Star-Ledger Wire ServicesApril 20, 2010, 7:30AM

At Fred Poordad’s bustling hepatitis C clinic in the heart of Los Angeles, one in every five patients receives no treatment. They are waiting for a wave of new drugs, expected in the next 18 months, that may boost their chance at a cure by as much as tenfold.The medicines also may bolster the prospects of Merck, Vertex Pharmaceuticals and & , the companies in a race to get the first new treatment to the market in a decade. About half of patients can’t tolerate the side effects of existing therapies, which generate $2 billion annually in sales. The new drugs could expand the market to $10 billion in five years, said Geoff Porges, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.They’re just the first among new therapies anticipated in the next five years as companies seek a single pill to cure the infection.Poordad, chief of hepatology at the Liver Disease and Transplant Center at

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, doesn’t object when his patients elect to wait for the new drugs, a practice known as "warehousing.""The warehousing has been going on for the past year or so," Poordad said. "I think we’ll see a tremendous increase in the volume of patients that are treated. That’s the most exciting thing in the field for a long time."The drugs closest to market, Merck’s boceprevir and telaprevir from Vertex and & , are protease inhibitors crafted from the technologies that led to discoveries made in the fight against HIV.The new treatments are being tested as additions to current standard treatments. Both drugs work by blocking the action of the protease enzyme the hepatitis virus needs to replicate, directly stopping it from spreading.Merck, of Whitehouse Station; Vertex, based in Cambridge, Mass., and its partner & , of New Brunswick, have said

they expect results from final-stage clinical trials by the second half of 2010, with submission to U.S. regulators by year-end. Patients can expect the drugs to be available by 2011, executives said April 16 at the annual meeting of the European Society for the Study of the Liver in Vienna."We’re on the brink of a revolution," Porges said in an interview at the conference. "Investors have been waiting for this for six to seven years, and investigators and physicians have been waiting for almost 10 years."He has an "outperform" recommendation on Vertex and sees the stock gaining 23 percent in the next year.Hepatitis C is already a billion-dollar annual business for Merck and will drive growth, said Bergstedt, the company’s senior vice president for vaccines and infectious diseases. The drugmaker acquired most of its treatment franchise in the $41 billion purchase last year of Schering-Plough.The three

drugmakers lead a packed field of competitors. A half-dozen other approaches to curing the disease are in development, with about 30 compounds being studied.-- Bloomberg Newshttp://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2010/04/nj_pharmaceutical_companies_le.html

http://Hepatitis Cnewdrugs.blogspot.com/2010/04/drugs-closest-to-market-mercks.html