Hepatitis C kills more people every year than AIDS.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Traditionally, hepatitis C has been treated with a combination of an injectable drug called interferon and another orally-administered medicine called ribavirin. It’s a grueling regimen, resulting in nausea, malaise, weight loss, skin and hair changes, anemia, thyroid problems and depression in many patients.
Moreover, the cure rate (technically called “sustained virologic response,” or SVR) for this regimen is less than 40 percent after 48 weeks of treatment. Many people cannot complete the full course of therapy because of the horrendous side effects.
Now, to the punchline.
At a recent national medical meeting of liver specialists, Dr. Mark Sulkowski of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center described a Phase II research protocol using a combination of two new oral medications, daclatasvir and sofosbuvir.
This medication combination has almost no side effects.
The gist of Dr. Sulkowski’s presentation is this: After a mere 12 weeks of treatment with this new regimen, the “cure” (SVR) rate for hepatitis C was an astonishing 93 percent.
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Hepatitis C patients have been waiting for a treatment regimen like daclatasvir and sofosbuvir for decades. It’s a true rarity in medicine — an honest-to-goodness game-changer, a phenomenally effective regimen for a serious, life-threatening disease that is also safe and well-tolerated.
The only problem? The two drugs are owned by different companies — daclatasvir is a Bristol-Myers-Squibb drug, while sofosbuvir is made by Gilead Sciences.
For reasons that are almost certainly financial in nature, Gilead has refused to do further work on this drug combination with Bristol-Myers Squibb, so there will be no further study of the regimen. With no Phase III trials, that means that the daclatasvir/sofosbuvir combination regimen will likely not be approved for use by the FDA.
Gilead has issued no formal commentary about why it does not wish to pursue further development of the new regimen, although there is speculation that it is altering its focus to produce single-tablet combination regimens — a product line that has been highly successful for the company in the treatment of HIV.
In fact, Gilead is doing quite well financially. It is a company with over $4 billion in annual revenues and over 4,000 employees. Its average margin of profitability over the last five years has been a whopping 34 percent.
Moreover, the total return to its shareholders on Gilead’s stock has been nearly 95 percent over the past year.
Still, the salient question is this: Should Gilead Sciences’ profitability trump doing what is right?
Since Dr. Sulkowski’s data presentation at the AASLD meeting in Boston this past November, over 200,000 hepatitis C patients worldwide have died of complications of their disease. Meanwhile, Gilead, a tremendously profitable corporation, refuses to consider the development of a drug regimen that could have cured most of those individuals in the pursuit of even greater profits.
http://hepc-cured.com/murphy-hepatit...logy-of-greed/
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