Vertex says 900,000 hepatitis C patients in the United States are awaiting better treatment

By Jennifer Lanning Drey

Eugene, Ore., June 22 - Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. said there are an estimated 900,000 patients in the United States who have been diagnosed with hepatitis C but are not being treated for the virus due to of the duration, efficacy rates and side effects associated with current treatments.

The company also believes that 650,000 of those hepatitis C virus patients have not tried current treatment methods, said John Alam, chief medical officer for Vertex, during a presentation given at the Piper Jaffray London Health Care Conference on Thursday.

"The commercial opportunity and the market opportunity is to have better treatments that will allow therapy to penetrate the large pool of already diagnosed patients that are effectively waiting - they're in a wait-and-see mode, waiting for better treatments before initiating treatment," he said.

Vertex is currently developing VX-950, an investigational oral hepatitis C protease inhibitor that the company hopes will be able to offer a three-month duration of treatment to patients with the virus. Current treatments for hepatitis C take about a year.

"With better therapy, we expect a significant market expansion," said Alam.

Vertex believes clinical trials of VX-950 will demonstrate that the drug can eradicate the virus and cure most patients of infection in a significantly shorter period than current treatments, Alam said.

The company also believes the availability of a drug offering better efficacy and a shorter treatment duration would eventually lead more people to get tested for the hepatitis C virus, he said.

"In the long run, the commercial opportunity is to penetrate beyond the patients who are already diagnosed and bring more patients into the system and drive diagnosis. That, we believe, will also be driven by better therapy," Alam said.

Vertex expects to produce a significant amount of data from VX-950 trials that are currently under way in the United States and Europe. The trials will involve more than 1,000 patients, 400 of whom have previously failed other treatments.

The company plans to have the first set of data from the trials in the fall and end-of-treatment data from 260 patients by the end of the year.

Vertex will provide additional data from the trials throughout 2007, Alam said.

Vertex is a biotechnology company located in Cambridge, Mass., specializing in small molecule drugs.

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