Telaprevir to be added to standard hep C therapy
pharmafile | March 27, 2011 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | hepatitis C, telaprevir
Telaprevir – currently being co-developed by Vertex, Johnson & Johnson and Mitsubishi Tanabe – will become part of a standard therapy for hepatitis C, according to Decision Resources.
The pharmaceutical market research and advisory firm says its analysis of data and expert opinion leads it to conclude that a three-way combination of telaprevir with peg-IFN-a-2a and ribavirin will quickly become standard.
Telaprevir is currently being reviewed by the FDA, and is expected to gain approval later this year.
The drug is expected to be added to the current standard treatment combination of Roche’s Pegasys (peg-IFN-a-2a) and ribavirin, and Decision Resources says it will gain full acceptance by 2013.
The analyst firm says it will attain gold standard status in 2013 thanks to its advantages in efficacy and delivery over all existing hepatitis C virus therapies.
The new report entitled Hepatitis C Virus (Treatment-Naive Patients): Triple- and Quadruple-Therapy Regimens Vying for Patient Share of a Diminishing Patient Population also finds that, in 2018, a quadruple therapy—a combination of two hepatitis C virus-specific antiviral agents (e.g. an HCV protease inhibitor plus a polymerase inhibitor or an NS5A inhibitor plus a protease inhibitor), a long-acting interferon and ribavirin—will likely be widely used for the treatment-naive patient population in hepatitis C virus.
“Multiple hepatitis C virus-specific antivirals are currently being developed and several combinations of direct antiviral agents, which include drugs from Pharmasset/InterMune/Roche, Vertex, Gilead and Bristol-Myers Squibb, are already being evaluated in clinical trials or are expected to enter clinical trials soon,” said Decision Resources analyst Alexandra Makarova.
“Although no clinical data are available yet on any quadruple regimen, we expect quadruple regimens for hepatitis C virus to have high efficacy, an acceptable safety profile and a convenient administration schedule.”
The report also finds that a hepatitis C virus-specific antiviral that (when used in combination with telaprevir/peg-IFN-a-2a/ribavirin for 24 weeks) achieves a better sustained virologic response in genotype 1 treatment-naive patients than a telaprevir/peg-IFN-a-2a/ribavirin regimen alone would earn a 50% patient share in treatment-naive patients in the US and a 45% patient share in Europe, according to surveyed US and European gastroenterologists.
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