Biotech Values

[iwfal]

I’m not sure that’s a correct characterization

You are right - it wasn't. My bad! On further thought I think our conversation was about whether the HCV new patients would decrease meaningfully over time. I think we'd both agree now that they are decreasing. Not hugely - but meaningfully.

the salient point is that exhaustion of the initial bolus has assumed greater importance as more and more competing HCV programs have been left by the wayside. Since we had the original discussion, drugs that have run into problems include ITMN-191, GS9190, and (most recently) the IDX184/IDX320 combination. All told, the competition is not creeping up on Telaprevir and Boceprevir as rapidly as most people probably thought.

Agreed that that bolus effects the market caps of the other DAAs if it was assumed that they would get a big hunk of that. But, as I said, I never assumed that ifn-L would get much of that. Any they got would be leftovers.

I think the number is much closer to 25%.

Just to be sure we aren't talking past one another - I agree that the dropouts due to side effects is about 20-30% of the ITT population into SOC. Given that about 50% of the ITT population fails SOC that means about 50% of that 50% is a failure due to side effects.

Altogether I suspect 25-40% of the bolus of SOC treatment failures or side-line sitters will still be waiting in 2015. T and B are thus certainly worthy of a substantially greater NPV than ifn-L. But my argument was about absolute NPV of ifn-L, not comparative to T or B.