New "Aft-Cast" From Decision Resources: More Telaprevir -- For Hep C Non-Responders

It's all kinda' "More Cowbell!", no?

T

his story feels a fair amount like listening to the truly small-market radio station's weather report, when all the DJ does is look out the studio window, and say "it's raining right now -- more of that -- this afternoon". Well, I guess it's good to see that the forecasting department at Decision Resources is catching up with the already unfolded-reality, in next-generation Hep C non-reponder-treatments. Vertex's Telaprevir is way ahead here:

. . . .Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that U.S. gastroenterologists will treat a larger proportion of treatment nonresponder hepatitis C patients with Vertex/Tibotec/Mitsubishi Tanabe's telaprevir than Merck's boceprevir. U.S. gastroenterologists indicate that they would prescribe telaprevir to 50 percent of their hepatitis C non-responder patients. Telaprevir is forecasted to earn 71 percent patient share in the U.S. hepatitis C non-responder market in 2013.

According to the majority of interviewed clinicians, telaprevir [a Vertex next generation Hep C drug candidate in Phase III] in combination with peg-interferon-alpha-2a/ribavirin will become the treatment of choice for hepatitis C virus genotype 1-infected patients who previously failed the peg-interferon-alpha/ribavirin treatment. . . .

I think I've been pointing to this for over a year and a half -- most recently, last week -- despite some static from a commenter, there.

It also looks like Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan made pretty good bets, on Vertex, in Q3 2008 -- at $28. Vertex in now trading north of $41.