Biotech Values

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Craig Wheeler summarized MS market quite well in today's earning call:

Ahmee Fahdia—UBS

You mean that the well established position in the market [i.e. Copaxone] will weigh much more than the fact that there will be an oral or an alternative in the market?

Craig Wheeler


I think it’s going to come down to specifically what the data on each of them are and the experience that the clinicians have prescribing it. Copaxone has the advantage of having relatively few side effects compared to, for example, the interferons which are out there. I think it’s a pretty clean agent and it works well for many, many MS patients. The orals that they’ve developed will be better understood as they get into larger and larger patient populations and ultimately it remains to be seen how those therapies evolve. In the MS marketplace, typically, the competition is on the end of new patients versus old patients. Patients that are doing well in therapies are pretty hesitant to switch the therapies in the position as well that the disease will stop progressing so it’s an evolving marketplace. It’s not something that switches dramatically as soon as a new product launches into it.