Estimated number
of people worldwide
million with hepatitis C
offer,” Pawlotsky says. “Now there might worked as well as taking the standard
be something to offer.” drugs for the usual 11-month course.
McHutchison and his colleagues ran- In the study reported at the Copen-domly assigned 250 hepatitis C patients hagen meeting, 453 patients who had
to get the standard drugs ribavirin and failed to respond to earlier treatment or
peginterferon alfa-2a, with or had relapsed after ward were
without telaprevir. The team similarly assigned to get tel-
The drug can
found that up to 67 percent of aprevir or not as part of a
cure many
those getting telaprevir were combination.
patients who
cured,comparedwith41per- Hepatologist Michael
have received
cent of those not getting it. Manns of the Hannover
Pawlotsky and his team Medical School in Germany
treatment
looked at 334 patients in and his colleagues reported
but are still
Europe. The cure rates that slightly more than half
fighting a
were up to 69 percent with of those getting telaprevir
losing battle.
telaprevir compared with were cured, compared with
46 percent with ribavirin and peginter- only 14 percent of those getting just the
feron alfa-2a alone, Pawlotsky says. standard drugs.
Both studies in NEJM found that tak- The studies were funded by Vertex
ing telaprevir for three months and the Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass.,
standard drugs for five and a half months which makes telaprevir. Schering-Plough
makes a similar drug, called boceprevir,
which tested well against first-time–
treated hepatitis C patients, according
to data presented at the Copenhagen
meeting.
About 3. 2 million people in the United
States have hepatitis C. It infects about
180 million people worldwide. Hepatitis C can cause fatigue, fever, jaundice
and abdominal pain. Patients who fail
to improve during treatment or who
relapse afterward risk developing cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. The
virus comes in four varieties. In these
studies, all patients had genotype 1, the
most common and difficult-to-treat kind
in Europe and North America.
Both telaprevir and boceprevir are
now in large-scale trials. McHutchison
says he expects both to get approved,
possibly as early as 2011.
