The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma

Authors: Barry Werth

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“Bush was inaugurated in a bone-chilling drizzle, the FDA approved Schering-Plough’s Pegintron for the treatment of patients with chronic hepatitis C. The drug was the first once-weekly injection of genetically engineered alpha interferon, a biological molecule released to help uninfected host cells resist new infection by a virus. In a study of more than a thousand patients comparing Pegintron to the company’s decade-old Intron A, which was shorter acting and taken three times a week, it double...d the cure rate to 24 percent when taken for forty-eight weeks. More than half the patients in the study complained of flu-like reactions: fevers, chills, muscle aches, sweating, exhaustion. A third of them reported being depressed. Roche, too, had filed for approval for a longer-acting interferon, Pegasys, setting up a marketing war as both companies began further studies combining the new medicines with a second broad-spectrum antiviral, ribavirin.
In the collaboration with Lilly, Vertex rediscovered that HCV wouldn’t yield to the usual stratagems.MoreLess Read More Read Less