Vertex ditches its once-stellar hep C drug
pharmafile | August 14, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Gilead, Incivek, Vertex, hep C, sovaldi
Vertex will stop selling its once-blockbuster hepatitis C drug in the US this autumn after being crushed by new therapies.
The announcement comes after Vertex confirmed that it sent a letter to American doctors earlier this week to inform them that Incivek (telaprevir) would not be available after 14 October.
Vertex had already said in May that it would withdraw from the hepatitis C market, but had not said when it would stop making the drug.
Incivek, which is marketed by Janssen outside the US, was approved in 2011 and became the fastest selling launch in drug history, quickly reaching $1.5 billion in sales in just four months.
But just as speedily as it started, sales began to slide dramatically by the end of 2012 as patients waited for promising new drugs from competitors.
In 2013, Gilead’s eagerly awaited hepatitis C drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir), a drug which costs $84,000 per patient in the US racked up record-breaking sales of $2.2 billion in the first quarter of this year, then $3.5 billion in the second, decimating Incivek in the process.
It is now tipped to reach $10 billion by 2015 and become the world’s biggest selling medicine.
Compare this to the first six months of this year where Incivek sales were just $13.2 million, a 96% drop from $361.4 million during the same period a year earlier.
Why has Sovaldi so completely crushed the competition? Because it has been clear throughout clinical testing that it is a highly efficacious medicine – in fact, it is the most effective hepatitis C treatment currently available.
Recent clinical trial data show Sovaldi can effectively cure the disease in over 90% of patients in just 12 weeks. This is compared to other treatments such as Incivek and Merck’s Victrelis (boceprevir), which take double the amount of time to treat and have cure rates of around 75 per cent.
This has effectively made Incivek obsolete. “The decline in the number of patients starting treatment was significant and there’s been a continued decline,” a Vertex spokesman tells the Wall Street Journal.
Ben Adams
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