Replies to post #178349 on Biotech Values

[Rocky3]

From Wells:

**IMS prescription data for Sovaldi were released for the week ending 5/23/2014, the 24th week of launch.

**The week's total Sovaldi prescriptions were 8,658, a change of +7.01% vs. last week's 8,091.

**The week's new Sovaldi prescriptions were 3,422, a change of -0.67% vs. last week's 3,445.

**Plugging this into our proprietary Sovaldi projector (available upon request), we believe U.S. Sovaldi sales could reach
the following under these scenarios:

(1) Base case - secondary warehousing - growth in new patient starts slows Q2-Q3 then picks up again Q4 (base case) -
$10.4B from $8.9B
(2) Rapidly decaying Sovaldi new patient starts throughout remainder of year (bear case) - $9.0B from $7.7B
(3) Sovaldi new patient starts level off for rest of year -$12.2B, from $10.4B
(4) Week-over-week NRx changes match those seen with Incivek+Victrelis at same point in launch - $10.4B from $8.7B

**We are extrapolating IMS's capture rate with two quarters of actual historical sales.

**BOTTOM LINE: We had have seen new prescriptions at 3,500-3,600 scripts/week in the first half of this quarter, with
these last two weeks' new scrips number representing a return to that baseline from launch week 22's''break-out'' of
3,891 new scrips. Scrips are not decreasing as fast as we had anticipated with our secondary warehousing scenario, suggesting the volume of patients coming onto Sovaldi may be a counterweight against that phenomenon. We continue
to expect some slowing down as the year progresses, but a pause in the decline of new patients starts suggest to us
2014 U.S. sales could still exceed $10B --suggesting a robust near- and long-term opportunity, and providing additional
evidence that high patient volume, especially once the all-oral cocktail is available, could offset more restrictive
reimbursement from public payers.