Biotech Values

[GWMAN]

The two leading protease inhibitors: Telaprevir (VRTX/JNJ; phase-3) and Boceprevir (MRK; phase-3). The Telaprevir program is further advanced, so let’s call Telaprevir and Boceprevir 1a and 1b, respectively. Both drugs have shown very impressive efficacy in phase-2 trials, although neither has a completely clean safety profile (see references below).


You might find it interesting to know that Asahi conducted a human study that showed blood filtration combined with standard care treatment produced cure rates as high or higher than results from Telaprevir clinical trials thus far. They are commercializing in Japan.
http://www.v-rad.jp/en/index.html

And on this front, AEMD's blood filtration device, the Hemopurifier, actually filters the blood with specificity for the virus while the Asahi approach filters based on size. Also, the hemopurifier removes a higher percentage of the virus per treatment compared to Asahi's.

The main point of this post is that filtration treatment at the beginning of drug treatment can improve the efficacy of current treatment and may well improve the efficacy of future drugs and/or make other adjunct drug therapies less desirable. And, of course, the nice thing about this adjunct filtrationtherapy is that it does not bring any toxicity/side-effect baggage with it. In short, the current ranking of promising HCV drugs treatments may well do some shifting in the next year