Thursday, April 18, 2013

The Hepatitis C Drug Pipeline Report: A Groundswell to Become a Sea Change

April 15, 2013
 
The Hepatitis C Drug Pipeline Report: A Groundswell to Become a Sea Change
 
by Benjamin Ryan
                    
At the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), researchers reveled in promising new data on forthcoming hepatitis C therapies. Shortly after, two pharmaceutical companies submitted their drugs to the FDA for approval.


Frantic competition between the major pharmaceutical players has accelerated progress on new hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapies to a breakneck speed. At the October 2012 annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), scientists were charged with excitement over the promise of a new paradigm in hep C treatment, one they predicted would arrive within a few years and would include simplified, all-oral, interferon-free therapies with high cure rates for broad swaths of the hep C population.  
Only five months later, at the 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta in March, it appeared that the revolution was even closer than earlier suspected, with predictions that game-changing combination therapies would hit the market by the second quarter of 2014.
To that end, two major players, Gilead Sciences and Medivir AB, have since announced their applications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval of new hep C direct acting antivirals (DAAs).

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