Idenix Pharmaceuticals' CEO Presents At Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference (Transcript)

The P&L, one of the things that we used to have on the top line was a royalty from Novartis related to our HBV compound, Tyzeka/Sebivo. In exchange for Novartis’ rights to compounds in our pipeline, we exchanged that royalty back to them as part of that transaction. And that was running at around a million a quarter, around $4 million a year. That’s pretty much it for the financials.

David Friedman - Morgan Stanley

And then you mentioned that you guys had previously been a sort of broader-focused antiviral company with an explicit focus in the last half a decade on HCV. Is there any intention to rebroaden? Or given that you guys have a number of HCV drugs in the clinic, is it your intention to focus exclusively on that part, carry that through? How are you thinking about that?

Ronald Renaud

It’s a great question. After Tyzeka/Sebivo, we clearly put our ambitions in HBV up on the shelf. And we were focused on HCV. And initially - I think some folks might remember - in HIV we had a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor called IDX899. That, preclinically, and even in the early proof of concept data, looked fantastic.

We ended up out-licensing that. HIV is obviously a big marketplace, and not one where we wanted to try to go alone with one compound. We out-licensed that to GSK, which became part of the ViiV Healthcare company, in a transaction that we did. I believe it was back in early 1999.

So after that, we used the financial resources gained from that transaction to really focus everything on HCV. And I think today we feel very strongly about making sure we get HCV right. We remain very, very confident in IDX184, IDX368. We have some additional nucleotide prodrugs that we’re going to bring forward, non G-based nucleotide prodrugs that will come forward during the span of the next 6 to 12 months.

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