Where Gilead May Be a Decade from Now
December 1, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
FOSTER CITY, Calif. – Pharmaceutical prognosticators predict Gilead Sciences, Inc. will remain a leader in providing therapies for hepatitis and HIV over the next decade, but also speculate the company will break ground in new treatment areas for oncology, respiratory and rheumatoid arthritis.
Contributors to The Motley Fool, an online investment news site, offered their decade-long predictions for the California-based company, which has, for the past 10 years, been a solid stock performer. Gilead’s is currently trading at $106.68 per share. In 2011, the stock was trading for $18.63 per share, up from $8.67 it was trading at 10 years ago in 2005.
Contributor Sean Williams said Gilead's dominance in treatments for hepatitis C, which includes the blockbuster drugs Harvoni and Sovaldi, will continue, in part due to the nearly 200 million HCV patient pool. Although it is likely that other companies will have their own hepatitis C treatments on the market by 2025, Williams said the efficacy of Gilead’s drugs will be hard to beat. In the meantime, he speculated Gilead will have additional treatments for other liver ailments, as well as hepatitis B.
Earlier this month, Harvoni was approved for expanded use in patients with genotype 4, 5 and 6 chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and in patients co-infected with HIV by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In addition, Harvoni plus ribavirin (RBV) for 12 weeks was approved as an alternate therapy to 24 weeks of Harvoni for treatment-experienced, genotype 1 patients with cirrhosis.
Gilead is also looking to speed up approval for a new HIV treatment by the FDA. In July, Gilead used a $125 million voucher to accelerate potential approval of the drug. The company acquired the voucher from Montreal-based Knight Therapeutics. The FDA can take up to 10 months to approve a new drug, but the voucher would trim that down by four months. Gilead is hoping to see approval for its once-daily tablet HIV-1 drug that combines Gilead’s emtricitabine and tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) with Janssen Pharmaceutical’s rilpivirine for the treatment of HIV-1 in Adults and pediatric patients in January 2016 rather than May 2016.
Motley Fool contributor Brian Feroldi is predicting Gilead might challenge AbbVie ’s blockbuster arthritis treatment Humira. Gilead currently has two Phase I therapies in that area.
While Cheryl Swanson touted the robust strength of Gilead’s pipeline, she said one thing that may help secure another decade of strong growth will be smart negotiations of mergers and acquisitions.
“Gilead's ability to identify, acquire, and commercialize drugs is in a class of its own,” Swanson said, highlighting acquisitions that brought such drugs as the HIV treatment Viread and an experimental molecule the company turned into Sovaldi.
“Gilead faces some challenges, and it may not be able to keep good news flowing quarterly in the near term. But consider that 10 years ago, in 2005, Gilead's fiscal-full-year revenue was a measly $2 billion. This year, it is forecasting revenue of $30 billion to $31 billion. Ten years from now? No guarantees, but I expect this biotech will still be blowing us out of the water,” Swanson added.