Vertex Pharmaceuticals has been going up against drug giant Merck in a marketing battle to treat hepatitis C — and so far it’s winning in a big way. Despite a partnership with Roche, one of the traditional leaders in the hepatitis C market, Vertex’s Incivik is being prescribed four times as often as Merck’s Victrelis, analysts say. This morning, Geoffrey Porges of Sanford C. Bernstein, a Vertex bull, wrote in a note to investors that Incivik is doing even better than they think. Porges says that if prescriptions of Victrelis were to stop growing entirely, the drug would still generate 2011 sales of $725 million, still slightly above the $700 million average of forecasts by Wall Street analysts.
