Thursday, January 12, 2012

Hype-atitis C? Analysts worry about a bubble forming in the HCV market

Hype-atitis C? Analysts worry about a bubble forming in the HCV market

With the global market for hepatitis C therapies expected to be worth $20 billion by the end of the decade, drugmakers have been racing to consolidate their hep C pipelines. In November, California’s Gilead bought Pharmasset, a New Jersey-based company with three experimental compounds targeting the hepatitis C virus (HCV), for a whopping $11 billion. And over the weekend, New York’s Bristol-Myers Squibb announced a $2.5 billion deal to acquire Inhibitex, a small Georgia-based company with an HCV polymerase inhibitor called INX-189 in phase 2 development. But, despite the growing interest in HCV therapies—Merck executives went as far as telling Bloomberg News at this week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco that the drug giant will “do anything” to be the leader in hepatitis C—some analysts say it’s too soon to know whether the HCV market will be as lucrative as it appears.

Continue Reading At Nature

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