The 58th Annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), also called the Liver Meeting, will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 2-6, 2007. This meeting is the leading conference in the science and practice of hepatology, including the latest findings on new drugs, novel treatments, and results of key clinical studies. We expect important results to emerge in regards to HCV therapies. This year’s meeting is especially noteworthy, since several promising HCV drugs have been lost due to attrition as well as highly anticipated clinical data of Telaprevir.

The primary focus of this year’s AASLD meeting will be the clinical data for Telaprevir, a leading drug candidate that may change the future medical care of patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV). If the sustained virologic response (SVR; undetectable virus six months after treatment) and safety results of Telaprevir are convincing, along with its first to market advantage and potential shorter treatment options (24 versus 48 weeks), then Telaprevir will strongly position itself as a leader in the HCV market. We anticipate the SVR data of Telaprevir to be 60-70%, although we believe an SVR of less than 65% will be viewed negatively. However, an SVR of above 60% should still be sufficient for FDA approval (assuming the control SVR is within the historical range). Related drugs that target the same viral enzyme, Boceprevir, and, to a lesser extent, ITMN-191, will also be closely watched, since the Telaprevir data may impact the market view of all of these drugs. We think the HCV polymerase inhibitors, R7128 and GS9190, are also of interest, even though they are early in clinical development. This class of drugs may prove to be more attractive, if data of Telaprevir fall below market expectations. Given the error-prone nature of HCV replication, the emergence of drug resistance is almost certain. Thus, optimal therapy could possibly involve a combination of these novel antiviral drugs (protease and polymerase inhibitors), pegylated-interferon alfa (Peg-IFN), and/or ribavirin.

We have detailed some of the more pertinent drugs below and we have attached a catalyst calendar for some of the more important presentations (this list is not allinclusive). These presentations can be accessed at the meeting website at https://www.aasld.org/eweb/StartPage.aspx.

For the full report, please download the PDF version at the top of this page.

For our disclosures, please read the BioMedTracker Research Standards.