Biotech Mailbag: Vertex Has Verve

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The Biotech Mailbag is open.

Wes P. writes, "Adam, did I miss your final verdict on Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX Quote) after the hepatitis C meeting last week? The stock has held up well since that meeting ended."

I wrote some about Vertex's showing at the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD) annual meeting, but Wes is right about me not getting around to summarizing after the confab of hepatitis C researchers ended Nov. 4.

Vertex's stock price, at around $27, tells the tale. It has held up well, in large part because Vertex emerged from AASLD as a winner. The company's experimental hepatitis C drug telaprevir took some shots from competitors but no one landed a knockout punch.

What a difference one year makes. At the November 2007 gathering of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD), Vertex shares took a beating because many investors believed that competing drugs from the likes of Boehringer Ingelheim, Merck(MRK Quote), the Tibotec division of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ Quote) and InterMune(ITMN Quote) were going to be superior to telaprevir in one way or another.

Never mind that there weren't any data on this crop of alleged telaprevir killers; their mere existence was enough to ratchet up the Vertex worry factor to near panic mode.

At this year's AASLD meeting, we had the first opportunity to dig into early but meaningful data from a lot of these competitor drugs. The results were good, but not unexpectedly good. And none of the data pointed to serious trouble for Vertex.

Boehringer's drug, BI201, for instance, reported a maximum median viral load reduction of 4.2 log at 14 days when used as a monotherapy dosed once daily. This compares to a 4-log reduction in viral load with Vertex's telaprevir monotherapy in a previous 14-day study. And telaprevir, recall, is dosed three times daily while Boehringer is dosed BI201 once daily.