Alas, there’s a more cynical interpretation. Response-guided therapy was a way to differentiate a product when a single DAA was added to the SoC, e.g. with Incivek and Victrelis. Indeed, the greater simplicity of the response-guided protocol in the FDA label for Incivek relative to Victrelis surely accounts for some of the plurality of Incivek’s sales relative to Victrelis’s.
However, in IFN-free (and perhaps ribavirin-free) regimens, any combination that produces a high SVR rate will be a huge commercial success, so there is no compelling business impetus for unduly shortening the duration of treatment. To the contrary, it could be harder for drugmakers to convince third-party payers of the fairness of a high cumulative treatment price if the duration were unduly short.
“The efficient-market hypothesis may be
the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated
in any area of human knowledge!”
