Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Buoyed by telaprevir’s success, Vertex adds more hepatitis C drugs to its pipeline

It’s looking more and more like Vertex Pharmaceuticals is working to monopolize the market on hepatitis C drugs. Hot off the approval of Vertex’s Incivek (telaprevir) at the end of May, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company announced today that they’re teaming up with South San Francisco’s Alios BioPharma to develop two more experimental compounds that disrupt the virus. Under the terms of the agreement, Vertex has committed $60 million up front and could give Alios as much as $1.5 billion in the long run.

Unlike Incivek, which targets an essential hepatitis C serine protease called NS3/4A, the two newly licensed drugs from Alios interfere with a different component of the hepatitis C replication machinery. Both agents disrupt a viral polymerase called NS5B, but the two compounds, dubbed ALS-2200 and ALS-2158, have different targets within the enzyme and work synergistically in pre-clinical cell-based studies, according to Vertex’s press release. With an eye to developing multidrug cocktails from within its own pipeline, Vertex has also shown that the Alios compounds have an additive effect with Incivek and another hep C drug known as VX-222.

After receiving an upfront payment of $60 million for the worldwide rights to the compounds, Alios could get an additional $715 million in research and developmental milestone payments if both drugs are approved, and another $750 million from Vertex based on sales.

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