February 4, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
After Gilead Sciences, Inc. sold $10.3 billion of its new hepatitis C drug Sovaldi in 2014, other drugmakers are looking for the next big earner—and it’s becoming increasingly clear that hepatitis B is “the next hepatitis C,” companies are saying this week.
Sovaldi sells for approximately $1,000 per pill, while its sister medication, also from Gilead, Harvoni, sold about $2.1 billion in 2014. Similar competitor AbbVie ’s HCV medication Humira recorded $12.5 billion in sales and is now gaining on the coattails of AbbVie’s new hepatitis C treatment, Viekira Pak. Both Sovaldi and Harvoni have treatment rates close to 90 percent, making them essentially a cure for many patients—success several companies are attempting to duplicate soon.
“We’re gunning for a cure,” OnCore Biopharma CEO Michael Sofia told Bloomberg in an interview. “With Sovaldi, we clearly brought innovation with the drug’s discovery and getting it to market. We feel we can translate that experience to hep B.”
The size of the market, and the chance to help the nearly 240 million people suffering from a chronic hepatitis B liver infection, makes that “cure” all the more tempting. Add to that the fact that at least 780,000 people die from hepatitis B annually, according to the World Health Organization, and you have a potent incentive for drugmakers to find new ways to tackle the disease.
Julie Papanek, a principal at Canaan Partners, told BioSpace last week that the funding side of biotech also continues to be interested in hepatitis B as an area of increasing interest.
Papanek, a former Genentech staffer who worked on commercial brand plans, forecasting and recommending modifications to Phase III trials designs for marketed and pipeline oncology products for the company, is now on the VC side of the business.
“We continue to look at areas of high unmet medical need such as Hep B, which I think is the next Hep C, particularly one company, Novira. We are also looking at other anti-infectives start-ups,” said Papanek.
Indeed, Canaan backed four out of the last 10 antibiotics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has established them as the early stage leaders when it comes to anti-infectives and antivirals.
“All of that space is really coming back into interest, exemplified by the Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc. acquisition by Merck & Co. ,” said Papanek. “Part of the momentum is that the FDA has created incentive programs, and part of it is that antibiotic resistant bacterial infections have progressed to a crisis level.”
She told BioSpace she is delighted by the amount of interest large companies and investments firms are showing in novel science.
“For us, it’s always, how can a company develop a new type of drug modality that allow you to go after those novel targets? We’ve had traditional chemistry and biological approaches for a very long time, but that’s not been enough. That’s limited where therapeutics have gone in the past,” she said. “Now we are seeing that there’s a resurgence of gene therapy, vaccine companies, and other approaches you can go after high medical need with new science.”
James Sapirstein, a former architect of Gilead’s antiviral portfolio, now runs ContraVir, another company looking to capitalize on the same talent that put Sovaldi on the map.
“This is absolutely the next frontier,” Sapirstein told Bloomberg when talking about scientists heading to startups focused on new science. “I have access to some of the best Pharmasset scientists who put Sovaldi on the map. The sky’s the limit for us.”
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Will Hiring Heat Up in 2015? With companies as large as Biogen Idec and as small as ICON upping their hiring across the board, where do you think the biotech job market will go in 2015? BioSpace wants your opinion!
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