Biotech Values

[ciotera]

It would be so unlike GILD

even though I just said HCV is unlike HIV, one could look at GILD's strategies in HIV to get a sense of what may happen. In HIV, GILD used its NRTI monopoly to secure increasingly lucrative deals with "third agent" companies and then, when the time is right, they "screw" their partners by developing their own combos (e.g., Quad) or obtaining data that favors a partnered drug at the expense of unpartnered drugs (e.g., PI to Complera switch data). In HCV, where the "party" is going to last only a short time (at least in the western world) and you can only get the patient once and possibly for as short of a period as several weeks, I think there is plenty of incentive to form as many collaborations as possible as early as possible.