Gilead's match! MSD will fight the battle of hepatitis C therapy again!

Source: Biovalley April 24, 2015 hepatitis C has always been one of the diseases that the biomedical industry focuses on, and Gilead has become the biggest winner in this field by introducing the special effect therapy sovaldi However, the biomedical industry is changing rapidly, and no company can become the winner forever In addition to the strong challenges in the existing market, Gilead is also facing the sniping of MSD in the research and development of the next generation of new hepatitis C drugs Today, Gilead and MSD have released the latest research data of their combination therapy of hepatitis C almost at the same time, and the data disclosure, which is almost like "about shelf", has also pushed the two companies to a new height in the field of competition Gilead published the data of its mid-term study of three-component hepatitis C combination therapy In this study, Gilead combined sovaldi with NS5A inhibitor gs-5816 and NS3 / 4A protease inhibitor gs-9857 The results showed that the response rate of this therapy to non cirrhotic hepatitis C patients who had not been treated before reached 93% The number of patients with cirrhosis and those with drug resistance decreased to 87% and 67%, respectively After four weeks of treatment, the SVR response rate was only about 27%, which was different from the researchers' expectation Even so, Gilead researchers still stressed that the company's development of gs-5816, gs-9857 will help further shorten the time period of treatment for hepatitis C patients Almost at the same time, MSD announced that its grazoprevir / elbasvir cocktail therapy has gained new positive data Grazoprevir / elbasvir has been approved by FDA as a breakthrough therapy, and is considered to have excellent efficacy in treating specific patient subgroups In the published study, researchers mainly investigated the effect of this cocktail therapy on patients with chronic kidney disease After 12 weeks of treatment, the cure rate of patients receiving this therapy reached 99% However, this result was obtained after eliminating 5% of patients' data errors MSD believes that the company's treatment will provide a new option for future hepatitis C patients to continue to eliminate the virus The clinical research information released by both companies seems to reveal that the next generation of new hepatitis C cocktail therapy will focus on the treatment of specific subtype patients and shorter treatment period Now it seems that Gilead is in an advantageous position in this competition with sovaldi, but MSD has also shown excellent R & D capability in this field, and the company is likely to occupy an objective share in this field in the future If considering the current active in this field, we can see that there will be another series of wars in the field of hepatitis C in the future.