A new generation of drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C is set to flood the market.
This month, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and drug behemoth Merck, headquartered in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, both released promising results from late-stage clinical trials of their leading drugs against hepatitis C virus (HCV).
The two treatments belong to the first wave of what pharmaceutical analysts think will be a profusion of HCV-targeting drugs that could ring up billions of dollars in annual sales. “There certainly is blockbuster potential for new and efficacious drugs in hepatitis C,” says Hedwig Kresse, a drug-market analyst at Datamonitor in London.
The virus infects liver cells and can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer. It affects about 3% of the world’s population — and new treatments are urgently needed.
“There are a lot of people who don’t respond to the current therapies or are unable to tolerate them,” says Paul Klenerman, who works on hepatitis C therapies at the University of Oxford, UK. “There’s no doubt there’s a big unmet need there.”
Currently, patients spend about a year taking a combination of interferon-α, a protein that boosts the immune system, and ribavirin, an antiviral drug that does not specifically target HCV. Roughly half of all patients with hepatitis C are cured by this course, but it can also cause serious side effects, such as depression, anaemia, and flu-like illness.
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