Vertex Pharmaceuticals is off to a running start with its new hepatitis C drug. The Cambridge company said yesterday that it generated $74.5 million in sales of telaprevir in the quarter that ended June 30. That’s an especially big number as far as pharmaceutical rollouts go; Wall Street analysts were expecting about $31 million. The drug was first cleared for sale by the Food and Drug Administration on May 23. The product has shown in clinical trials that when it is added to a couple of standard treatments, it can double the cure rate to about 80 percent of patients, while cutting the course of treatment in half, to about six months.
